Hi all,
There have been a lot of questions as to whether this works on various platforms. I am very happy with it, but wanted to elaborate on a few of the pitfalls I had to deal with getting this working on Java/Tomcat/Struts, and with a mac!
First, it wasn't hard to find messages showing how to set the default value in a the richtext area. Validation was a bit tricky (I wanted to make certain that there was at least one character with no whitespace in the text). However, you can search the responses to my question posted on this board for the solution to that. Kudos to those who helped.
That is where the tricky bits come in...
There is an issue with tomcat 5 and UTF-8 encoding. Basically, the methodology of how tomcat 4 and tomcat 5 configures the response for UTF-8 data in the POST response has changed. Once I worked around that, all was good.
There are many needless tags in the board, and I wanted to make certain that the user didn't input <script> tags, etc. with the post. So I went with a product NekoHtml, that parsed the response and stripped any bad tags, attributes, malicious code, etc.. I was all prepared to suffer a long drudgery of code attempts to get it to work, but damned if it didn't work on the first try.
The next bit was hard. How to add some new tags: quoting a response, etc. on the message board. Well, I tried for about 2 days to get that all to work, but the code seems a bit to cryptic and sensitive for me to work with, so I just allow the user to add <quote> and </quote> in the text and I parse it on the server. Not beautiful, but it works well enough.
The result? A very good and fairly reliable editor (it definitely earns the label beta-2). However, all of the failings are immediately visible and the user can smartly work around them. I will post the issues on another thread.
If you want to check the resulting text, and peek around the message board (I plan on open-sourcing it in the very near term... 6 months) you are of course welcome. It is a role-play gaming board, so don't be too surprised about the content. Anyways, I look forward to the next releases, and if I can help get others integrate this product I'd be happy to help!
Thanks again.
There have been a lot of questions as to whether this works on various platforms. I am very happy with it, but wanted to elaborate on a few of the pitfalls I had to deal with getting this working on Java/Tomcat/Struts, and with a mac!
First, it wasn't hard to find messages showing how to set the default value in a the richtext area. Validation was a bit tricky (I wanted to make certain that there was at least one character with no whitespace in the text). However, you can search the responses to my question posted on this board for the solution to that. Kudos to those who helped.
That is where the tricky bits come in...
There is an issue with tomcat 5 and UTF-8 encoding. Basically, the methodology of how tomcat 4 and tomcat 5 configures the response for UTF-8 data in the POST response has changed. Once I worked around that, all was good.
There are many needless tags in the board, and I wanted to make certain that the user didn't input <script> tags, etc. with the post. So I went with a product NekoHtml, that parsed the response and stripped any bad tags, attributes, malicious code, etc.. I was all prepared to suffer a long drudgery of code attempts to get it to work, but damned if it didn't work on the first try.
The next bit was hard. How to add some new tags: quoting a response, etc. on the message board. Well, I tried for about 2 days to get that all to work, but the code seems a bit to cryptic and sensitive for me to work with, so I just allow the user to add <quote> and </quote> in the text and I parse it on the server. Not beautiful, but it works well enough.
The result? A very good and fairly reliable editor (it definitely earns the label beta-2). However, all of the failings are immediately visible and the user can smartly work around them. I will post the issues on another thread.
If you want to check the resulting text, and peek around the message board (I plan on open-sourcing it in the very near term... 6 months) you are of course welcome. It is a role-play gaming board, so don't be too surprised about the content. Anyways, I look forward to the next releases, and if I can help get others integrate this product I'd be happy to help!
Thanks again.