The DISTINCT command: The DISTINCT command is used for retrieving unique data entries dependent on the columns specified. The opposite way of thinking about it is that it eliminates duplicate result rows. For a basic example lets assume we have the following person table and data First Name Last Name City State Matthew Denton Fayetteville…

For those creating dynamic text fields in Flash it often comes as a surprise that dynamic text fields do not behave as expected when modifying the alpha parameter of it or it’s parent. Often even I forget that telling a movie clip to transition out based on a tween of its alpha property doesn’t modify…

What is the Flash Context Menu? The Flash Context Menu is the menu that appears when you right-click on a flash swf. This menu normally contains settings, about, zoom and quality if not modified by the user.  This menu is an excellent place to put the copyright or credits of the application with links to…

What is Pagination Pagination is the process of displaying a subset of the data on a web page at one time. The simplest example is a google search result in that after a search is performed you are displayed with the first x results as page 1. Then utilizing the page handlers you are able…

There are a few methods available to the Sybase Transact-SQL developer who needs to obtain the next primary key for the next row to be inserted. If the primary column is an identity column then the next_identity function can be used. The proper syntax is: SELECT next_identity( “TABLE_NAME” ) If however you have not used…

All web developers know that they can add comments to their HTML by use of the <!– –> tag. This causes the contents to not be rendered to the viewer but still displayed in the source of the page. This method of commenting can still be done in JSP but in addition there is the<%–…

Often in JSP we find ourselves creating links to other pages within our web application.  The below code allows us to easily get the web application context path from within a JSP file. ${pageContext.request.contextPath} Utilizing JSTL we could also set this value to a variable so that we have a short hand method for getting…

Why should developers use logging? Logging to those new in the development world is the process of putting output statements inside your code to facilitate debugging and analysis of performance or issues.  Development of an application is completed by going through a life-cycle that typically includes requirements, code production, testing, and deployment in some manor.…

What is Test-driven Development? Test-driven development is a process or technique for the development of software or code. The main focus with this process is the understanding of the requirements to enable the developer to write tests for new functionality and features before they write any code. This enables the developer to have a specific…

What is a Property File? A .properties file is a file used to store the configurable parameters of your Java application. The standard format for the Property File is one parameter per line with key value pairs delimited by the  equals (=) character. Comments are allowed in the file by placing a # or !…