Andrew Beacock's Blog

Apache Velocity is an excellent tool if you need to bang out a quick bit of XML output or a text file with a particular layout and you don't want to do it all in Java. You create a Velocity template with your text in it and use various place-holders for the dynamic data that will be passed into it from your Java code. Velocity them merges the two together to give you a nicely formatted custom-filled file/document/SOAP request/etc. It's a great tool but does have it's quirks and downsides and one that I hit upon recently was how to display dates in a particular format. You can call methods on any Java object that you pass to the template but only if it's in the Java bean standard format of getX() and the Date formatting methods don't follow this standard. The solution was found within the optional Velocity-Tools library - DateTool. DateTool has a number of format methods on it which can twist the dates and times into any format that you need, here are some ex

I use JavaScript & jQuery quite a bit in my day job helping to add a bit of 'shiny' to our web applications. One feature that I added recently kept a track of the percentages that you had typed in the form.  It told you at the bottom of the page how much percentage you had left - I used JavaScript's parseInt function to help me in this respect. As the application passed through system test it was found that if you typed '020' as a percentage my application said that you had 84% left to assign rather than the expected 80% - any ideas what's going on? Yes that's right - the leading zero was causing parseInt to treat the number as an octal (base 8) number and so 020 was two lots of 8 = 16. It appears that this octal recognition is being deprecated but who knows when it will actually go so for now I've had to add ", 10" (i.e. a decimal radix) to the end of all of my parseInt calls: parseInt(percentage, 10); Double check any code that you