JavaScript provides no good way to check if a variable exists.  If you try to use one that doesn't, you get a big fat error.  I've seen some people use:

if (myVar == undefined)

But this only works if the variable has been declared, but wasn't set to a value.  Sometimes, you don't know if the variable was even declared.

Here's some code that solves that: 

try {
      if (myVar) {}
} catch (err) {
      var myVar = "";
}

To set up Plone, I wanted to make sure that I could continue to use other web applications, such as PHP and Java applications.  This can be accomplished using Apache with mod_proxy and mod_rewrite.  I'll cover this from an Ubuntu perspective, but setting this up on other distributions or operating systems should be similar.  While Ubuntu spreads the configuration to many different files, on many other systems you can put all the configuration lines I mention below directly into http.conf.

Install Apache

Start by installing Apache 2.
On Ubuntu:Read more

This may seem like a trivial entry to some, but I had a terrible time figuring out how to get the Jetty integrated JBoss distribution to look like your standard webserver. It took me so much time, I promised myself I would publish directions to make it easier for others.

A) JBoss-Jetty runs on port 80
B) JBoss-Jetty has a root context (the base application for the website, such as http://dmartin.org).

A) wasn't hard to figure out.Read more

I spent most of my free time in the past week developing the dmartin.org website from the ground up. In my commitment to leaving behind all things proprietary and expensive (ie.Read more