It’s Only Software

As a frequent contributor to the Spring Framework user forums, I have noticed a common trend among people new to Spring MVC - they really don’t understand how to use JSTL and EL in their Spring-driven JSPs.

Although Spring MVC supports flexibility in choosing a view technology, in my [back of the napkin] estimate, at least 80% of the time it is paired with JSP and JSTL. Unfortunately, since JSP was pushed out about 4-5 years ago, a lot of the information that you find on the web is extremely dated, often going back to JSTL 1.0 syntax (or, gasp, using scriptlets!). In this article I’ll clear up the confusion around how to use JSTL with various app servers and webapp versions.
Continue reading “How to Reference and Use JSTL in your Web Application”

On a side project recently, I decided to try out the Amazon Associated Web Service API, a Java library provided by Amazon which wraps the Amazon Associates Web Service calls with a friendly Java API.

For those who are considering integration with Amazon Associates Web Services (used for things as item search, item detail retrieval, and cart manipulation), this API provides a very deep and rich integration with Amazon, with a relatively shallow learning curve. I’ll provide a simple example here of doing an item lookup by ASIN (Amazon’s unique product IDs), and point you around some of the data structures you’ll encounter when dealing with ASINs.

Continue reading “5 Minute Guide to the Java Amazon Associates Web Service API”