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...chances are quite high that after a few logged sessions, the hacker will have enough info to build your complete password.

...goddamn it! Cracker, phisher, but not hacker

I own several O'Reilly books, many of them relating to Hacks - whether it be for Postfix, OS X, et cetera. It's funny (or perhaps just interesting, depending on your sense of humor) how the term "hack" has evolved over time. Am I a hacker if I utilize a book to balance a shaky table? Of course I'm being a bit facetious with that example!

I understand this might be (mistakenly) modded offtopic, but hopefully the powers that be acknowledge the relevance.

Some applications are just way too complex. As your application grows, this test will be less useful. I am trying to learn automated testing of web applications, and so far, I've found that javascript and popups are evil.

This post is kinda silly.

--
say NO to software patents
Donald Knuth Letter to the Patent Office.
Carta a la Oficina de Patentes por el Profesor Donald Knuth

Here in Colombia we have an OSS comunity that is working on a Law Proposal to the Colombian goverment about the use of OSS.

Here in Colombia we have an OSS comunity that is working on a Law Proposal to the Colombian goverment about the use of OSS.

I would like to invite you all to check out Hyper Builder, at http://bachue.com/hb. It is a very simple "scripting language" that allows you to solve many of the typical web-development problems very easily.

It has a system of modules (which can be loaded dynamically at run time or compiled into the interpreter). This works kinda like Server Side Includes where the tags are mapped to callback functions in the modules.

HB comes with a standard set of useful modules. Some examples are the SQL module (currently supporting MySQL and PostgreSQL), the Wall module (to make bulletin boards, guest books, etc), the polls module (with lots of code from Pollera, a standalone application for making polls on the web), the Perl module (to embbed Perl code in your pages), the access counter module, the authentication module (which can authenticate against different backends) and many other. They allow you to do things such as set/read cookies, show input from HTML forms, print the system time, show the output of system("commands"), send email, show/write files, etc., very easily.

You can also combine all those different modules very easily. It's kinda messy to combine all the different Perl scripts you just downloaded and have them show all their output in the same page. You end up editing different scripts to have them print the HTML the way you want and use something like Server Side Includes to tie them together. With HB it's natural to do things such as placing a message wall under the poll and allowing only registered users to vote (you are using the walls, polls and authentication modules here). And just in case you can't find a module to do what you are looking for, you can always go create it in C or Perl.

HB can run as CGI (useful when recompiling Apache is not an option and performance is not that important) or as a pthreaded application server that a Apache module provided contacts via a TCP socket (increases performance greatly and lets you run the application server and web server on different machines).

You can take a look at some examples of what can be done with the standard modules at http://bachue.com/hb/ex/examples.cgi/. The source code for all of them is provided in http://bachue.com/hb/ex/examples.hb.

One big advantage of HB over other systems such as PHP, Servlets, ASP, Perl, C+CGI and Zope is that it is very easy to maintain big sites designed on it. For example, showing an access counter usually goes like doing <counter src="file" inc="1" show>. In all the other languages, you usually have to open the file, lock it, read the counter, increase it, write it, close the file (unlocking it) and print the counter. Since everything is so easy to do, sites are very easy to maintain.

Anyway, I strongly recommend it for your web development.

Alejo.

Disclaimer: I'm the current maintainer of HB so I might be a little biased.

I would like to invite you all to check out Hyper Builder, at http://bachue.com/hb. It is a very simple "scripting language" that allows you to solve many of the typical web-development problems very easily.

It has a system of modules (which can be loaded dynamically at run time or compiled into the interpreter). This works kinda like Server Side Includes where the tags are mapped to callback functions in the modules.

HB comes with a standard set of useful modules. Some examples are the SQL module (currently supporting MySQL and PostgreSQL), the Wall module (to make bulletin boards, guest books, etc), the polls module (with lots of code from Pollera, a standalone application for making polls on the web), the Perl module (to embbed Perl code in your pages), the access counter module, the authentication module (which can authenticate against different backends) and many other. They allow you to do things such as set/read cookies, show input from HTML forms, print the system time, show the output of system("commands"), send email, show/write files, etc., very easily.

You can also combine all those different modules very easily. It's kinda messy to combine all the different Perl scripts you just downloaded and have them show all their output in the same page. You end up editing different scripts to have them print the HTML the way you want and use something like Server Side Includes to tie them together. With HB it's natural to do things such as placing a message wall under the poll and allowing only registered users to vote (you are using the walls, polls and authentication modules here). And just in case you can't find a module to do what you are looking for, you can always go create it in C or Perl.

HB can run as CGI (useful when recompiling Apache is not an option and performance is not that important) or as a pthreaded application server that a Apache module provided contacts via a TCP socket (increases performance greatly and lets you run the application server and web server on different machines).

You can take a look at some examples of what can be done with the standard modules at http://bachue.com/hb/ex/examples.cgi/. The source code for all of them is provided in http://bachue.com/hb/ex/examples.hb.

One big advantage of HB over other systems such as PHP, Servlets, ASP, Perl, C+CGI and Zope is that it is very easy to maintain big sites designed on it. For example, showing an access counter usually goes like doing <counter src="file" inc="1" show>. In all the other languages, you usually have to open the file, lock it, read the counter, increase it, write it, close the file (unlocking it) and print the counter. Since everything is so easy to do, sites are very easy to maintain.

Anyway, I strongly recommend it for your web development.

Alejo.

Disclaimer: I'm the current maintainer of HB so I might be a little biased.

I would like to invite you all to check out Hyper Builder, at http://bachue.com/hb. It is a very simple "scripting language" that allows you to solve many of the typical web-development problems very easily.

It has a system of modules (which can be loaded dynamically at run time or compiled into the interpreter). This works kinda like Server Side Includes where the tags are mapped to callback functions in the modules.

HB comes with a standard set of useful modules. Some examples are the SQL module (currently supporting MySQL and PostgreSQL), the Wall module (to make bulletin boards, guest books, etc), the polls module (with lots of code from Pollera, a standalone application for making polls on the web), the Perl module (to embbed Perl code in your pages), the access counter module, the authentication module (which can authenticate against different backends) and many other. They allow you to do things such as set/read cookies, show input from HTML forms, print the system time, show the output of system("commands"), send email, show/write files, etc., very easily.

You can also combine all those different modules very easily. It's kinda messy to combine all the different Perl scripts you just downloaded and have them show all their output in the same page. You end up editing different scripts to have them print the HTML the way you want and use something like Server Side Includes to tie them together. With HB it's natural to do things such as placing a message wall under the poll and allowing only registered users to vote (you are using the walls, polls and authentication modules here). And just in case you can't find a module to do what you are looking for, you can always go create it in C or Perl.

HB can run as CGI (useful when recompiling Apache is not an option and performance is not that important) or as a pthreaded application server that a Apache module provided contacts via a TCP socket (increases performance greatly and lets you run the application server and web server on different machines).

You can take a look at some examples of what can be done with the standard modules at http://bachue.com/hb/ex/examples.cgi/. The source code for all of them is provided in http://bachue.com/hb/ex/examples.hb.

One big advantage of HB over other systems such as PHP, Servlets, ASP, Perl, C+CGI and Zope is that it is very easy to maintain big sites designed on it. For example, showing an access counter usually goes like doing <counter src="file" inc="1" show>. In all the other languages, you usually have to open the file, lock it, read the counter, increase it, write it, close the file (unlocking it) and print the counter. Since everything is so easy to do, sites are very easy to maintain.

Anyway, I strongly recommend it for your web development.

Alejo.

Disclaimer: I'm the current maintainer of HB so I might be a little biased.

Java is pointless overhead on a server? It is not.

I think you are probably talking about the process of launching the JVM and opening the class once for every HTTP request. CGI has exactly that problem (although the overhead may be lower).

It is not Java what has the overhead but the idea of launching a new application for every request. If you use Servelts or Apache modules, you'll get rid of that performance overhead.

I made some tests with HB. When it was running via CGI, I could attend a given number of requests in 51 seconds. I then hacked it to work as an Apache Module and I could attend the same number of HTTP requests in just 6.

And, you may think I am a Java believer. But no. I am far from that. I have done most of my web-related work using C. And then Perl (but far more C than Perl). And now I am using HB. However, there is no overhead if you use Java the right way.

Azul, who doesn't have his password here nor the time to get it.

We are developing Hyper Builder, one server-side engine to develope dynamic content.

You may want to try it out. You create your sites using any text editor and embbeding some HTML tags that are mapped to callback functions. Kinda like server side includes.

It's functionality is provided by modules that are dynamically loaded at run time. For example, you may create a module that will make it so whenever you put a given HTML tag it gets replaced by a given content (similar to the way Server Side Includes do it). There are modules that allow it to talk with PostgreSQL (and soon MySQL), create polls, message walls, access counters, user authentication, use HTTP cookies and much more.

Whenever someone requests one of your pages, the parser loads the HB source files and builds the content that gets sent back to the browser. It communicates with the web server via CGI. However, work is in progress to build a threaded standalone server that talks with Apache through a socket. Whenever someone requests a file ending in .hb, Apache (mod_hb) connects to the HB daemon and passes it the request.

It currently works only on Unix, but there are efforts to port it to Windows and other platforms.

I urge you to consider it as an alternative for building both big and small sites. It is *far* easier to use than other alternatives such as C, Perl or Java via CGI, PHP and ASP. Sites developed using HB are *far* easier to update, understand and modify. And you can get things done really faster (true both for big and for small sites).

You can find more information at the following locations:

• Hyper Builder's main page
• User's Manual
• Example site (and it's source)

Good luck.

Alejo.

We are developing Hyper Builder, one server-side engine to develope dynamic content.

You may want to try it out. You create your sites using any text editor and embbeding some HTML tags that are mapped to callback functions. Kinda like server side includes.

It's functionality is provided by modules that are dynamically loaded at run time. For example, you may create a module that will make it so whenever you put a given HTML tag it gets replaced by a given content (similar to the way Server Side Includes do it). There are modules that allow it to talk with PostgreSQL (and soon MySQL), create polls, message walls, access counters, user authentication, use HTTP cookies and much more.

Whenever someone requests one of your pages, the parser loads the HB source files and builds the content that gets sent back to the browser. It communicates with the web server via CGI. However, work is in progress to build a threaded standalone server that talks with Apache through a socket. Whenever someone requests a file ending in .hb, Apache (mod_hb) connects to the HB daemon and passes it the request.

It currently works only on Unix, but there are efforts to port it to Windows and other platforms.

I urge you to consider it as an alternative for building both big and small sites. It is *far* easier to use than other alternatives such as C, Perl or Java via CGI, PHP and ASP. Sites developed using HB are *far* easier to update, understand and modify. And you can get things done really faster (true both for big and for small sites).

You can find more information at the following locations:

• Hyper Builder's main page
• User's Manual
• Example site (and it's source)

Good luck.

Alejo.

We are developing Hyper Builder, one server-side engine to develope dynamic content.

You may want to try it out. You create your sites using any text editor and embbeding some HTML tags that are mapped to callback functions. Kinda like server side includes.

It's functionality is provided by modules that are dynamically loaded at run time. For example, you may create a module that will make it so whenever you put a given HTML tag it gets replaced by a given content (similar to the way Server Side Includes do it). There are modules that allow it to talk with PostgreSQL (and soon MySQL), create polls, message walls, access counters, user authentication, use HTTP cookies and much more.

Whenever someone requests one of your pages, the parser loads the HB source files and builds the content that gets sent back to the browser. It communicates with the web server via CGI. However, work is in progress to build a threaded standalone server that talks with Apache through a socket. Whenever someone requests a file ending in .hb, Apache (mod_hb) connects to the HB daemon and passes it the request.

It currently works only on Unix, but there are efforts to port it to Windows and other platforms.

I urge you to consider it as an alternative for building both big and small sites. It is *far* easier to use than other alternatives such as C, Perl or Java via CGI, PHP and ASP. Sites developed using HB are *far* easier to update, understand and modify. And you can get things done really faster (true both for big and for small sites).

You can find more information at the following locations:

• Hyper Builder's main page
• User's Manual
• Example site (and it's source)

Good luck.

Alejo.

We are developing Hyper Builder, one server-side engine to develope dynamic content.

You may want to try it out. You create your sites using any text editor and embbeding some HTML tags that are mapped to callback functions. Kinda like server side includes.

It's functionality is provided by modules that are dynamically loaded at run time. For example, you may create a module that will make it so whenever you put a given HTML tag it gets replaced by a given content (similar to the way Server Side Includes do it). There are modules that allow it to talk with PostgreSQL (and soon MySQL), create polls, message walls, access counters, user authentication, use HTTP cookies and much more.

Whenever someone requests one of your pages, the parser loads the HB source files and builds the content that gets sent back to the browser. It communicates with the web server via CGI. However, work is in progress to build a threaded standalone server that talks with Apache through a socket. Whenever someone requests a file ending in .hb, Apache (mod_hb) connects to the HB daemon and passes it the request.

It currently works only on Unix, but there are efforts to port it to Windows and other platforms.

I urge you to consider it as an alternative for building both big and small sites. It is *far* easier to use than other alternatives such as C, Perl or Java via CGI, PHP and ASP. Sites developed using HB are *far* easier to update, understand and modify. And you can get things done really faster (true both for big and for small sites).

You can find more information at the following locations:

• Hyper Builder's main page
• User's Manual
• Example site (and it's source)

Good luck.

Alejo.

Since Slashdot contains lots of dynamic contents (or rather, since it nothing but dynamic content), the Perl scripts print the appropiate HTTP headers (Pragma, No-Cache and related) to instruct what receives the pages (browsers, proxies and tunnels) not to cache them. That means that whenever you abandon the page (follow a link) the browser will discard it, so when you hit back, you will have to reload it.

I am developing an engine to create dynamic content and it does just the same thing: ask whatever receives the pages not to cache them.

It can be a pain to press the back button, but, on the other hand, you could always `open link in new window' whenever you plan to continue seeing a given page (that is, unless you are using Lynx which ignores all those headers anyway (at least until version 2.8.1rel.2)). Just in case you don't know, you can open links in new window just by clicking them with the middle button in Unix Netscape.

Alejo.

Alejo.

Just take a look at the web pages designed by the "WYSIWYG editors are a crock for the ignorant!" crowd. Just for kicks, I took at the web pages of the people holding that attitude in this thread, and the most striking thing about all of them is how absolutely ugly and/or simplistic (read: uninteresting) they are -- usually just a bunch of links in a list, with a smattering of images. Wheeee! It's as if they're existing in a time warp from way back in the first year of the web, so I can understand them thinking that a text editor is the be-all-end-all in HTML design. One thing that is clear is that if any of these people's jobs depended on making quality web pages, they'd be out on the street begging for spare change. Hey, don't believe me? Just follow the links for yourself and see. The people coming out against WYSIWYG editors, who also had links to their own web pages:

• Masem (http://pinky.wtower.com/mneylon/)
• quadra (http://quadra.demosoft.org/)
• jawsh (http://jcs.superblock.net/)
• doobie (http://www.doobie.org/)
• Azul (http://bachue.com/alejo/)
• Scott (http://www.gothic.net/~raindog/process/of/disasse mbly/)
• TypoDaemon (http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Labyrinth/8955/)
• Haight6716 (http://www.julianhaight.com/)
• Mark Hughes (http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/) Okay, so this one's from yesterday's discussion on live updates of web pages, but after reading his quote, "We should be trying to *RAISE* the level-of-entry training needed to make a web page, not *LOWER* it," and then seeing his web site, I just couldn't resist. :-)

In other words, for those of you complaining that WYSIWYG HTML editors are for unsophisticated dummies, I can only look at your own web pages and wonder just what your idea of sophistication is. If I had seen even one of you using some interesting HTML techniques, you might have a better chance of persuading me. Fact is, anybody can make ugly web pages, whether they're using vi or DreamWeaver, but most (not all) of the better-looking and interesting sites that I see out there are using tools other than just text editors. Most importantly, if you're going to come out and bash people for using WYSIWYG editors, you might wanna check your own sites first.

Me? FrontPage 2000 and DreamWeaver 2, using UltraEdit and vi for quick-and-dirty changes.

Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com