This site features several articles written to share lessons from a decade of experience building large interactive web-based applications in Perl, JSP and Java.

Web Applications as Java Servlets

A servlet-based architecture and class library for validating request parameters and for detecting invalid links between pages at compile time.

Multi-line Strings with Executable Inclusions:

A simple preprocessor that makes it practical to handle long strings of html text as multi-line strings that user interface specialists who know html but not java can work with effectively. The preprocessor will also expand Java expressions (executable inclusions) within strings like Perl.

Demonstration Web Application

The demonstration web application described in these papers.

Download

This provides access to all software described in these papers.

Java Documents

The Java API documents for the classes that support the servlet-based architecture described in these papers.

The following supporting links may help to put these articles into context:

virtualschool.edu

An ambitious distributed learning endeavor that won the $25,000 Paul Allen competition in 1997 for the best distance learning system nationwide. The site started as Perl cgi programs with a hand-coded database, and evolved over time into the mod-perl and MySql based version at the above link.

superdistributed.com

My company's website. This was originally developed in Apache JServ with the GNU JSP package, then ported to Apache/Tomcat/JSP over the summer. I converted the site to the architecture described in this paper over the Christmas holidays to verify the approach described in this paper. The new version has not yet been tested and uploaded to the public site at this point, so the public version is still the JSP version.

The Author

Background information about me and my interests.