In this example I will present the reader with a simple way of using iText for form fill automation. A simple example of how this comes useful is when a user fills information in a web form or a series of forms (as part of a workflow) and at the end is presented with an option to save or print a summary or an agreement. In this situation it is very useful to present the user with an opportunity to use Adobe’s PDF format in addition to plain HTML.

In order to proceed with the execution you will need the latest iText jar which you can find here. In addition you will have to have or create a PDF form which will be used in the automated form completion process. For the purposes of this example I have created a very simple form using Adobe Acrobat Professional which has just 2 simple fields: first name and last name. You can download the form used in this example Form. The two form fields are called FirstName and LastName. Next we can use the following java code to load the template, extract the form, and fill the desired information in the fields:

// get the destination
String location = "C:/java/pdf/src/";
if (location != null && !location.endsWith(File.separator))
{
location = location + File.separator;
}

PdfReader reader = new PdfReader(location + "Form.pdf");
String name = "Output.pdf";
PdfStamper stamp = new PdfStamper(reader, new FileOutputStream(location + name));
AcroFields form = stamp.getAcroFields();

String last = "subform[0].LastName[0]";
String first = "subform[0].FirstName[0]";

form.setField(last, "HRISTOV");
form.setField(first, "NEDKO");

// close pdf stamper
stamp.setFormFlattening(true);
stamp.close();
reader.close();

The snippet above creates a file called Output.pdf and fills the text values in. In addition to simple textboxes you can have checkboxes,  number fields, dropdowns, fields with format validation like phone numbers, social security numbers, barcodes etc. In the next example I provide a more complex form with different types of fields.

1. Reduce your energy consumption – you can be very creative here: start by purchasing Energy Star products, not leaving lights and appliances working while not using them, be smart setting the thermostat of your heater and air conditioning to a reasonable level, use energy efficient light bulbs, don’t leave appliances on standby (this alone can reduce consumption by 10%), look at your bill for other suggestions. Efficiency programs are often available with your utility provider.

2. Reduce water use – don’t waste water. Starting from gardening, shower time, the kitchen you can be very creative. Use shower heads and facets that save water, monitor leaks, check your toilet water consumption.

3. Reduce gas consumption – use fuel efficient vehicle, telecommute, use public transportation, bike, walk, or use rideshare with a friend or coworker.

4. Eat smart – don’t waste food. Watch your food consumption and make sure you don’t waste any of it. Remember that one third of the people on earth are underfed. NEVER throw away good food. If your food goes bad change your shopping habits. Purchase locally raised products.

5. Buy smart – support products that use less packaging and employ environmentally friendly methods and by-products in their packaging.

6. Recycle – start by reading your news online and cancel that paper subscription. Separate your mail and trash and dispose of it properly. Cancel all your paper bills and sign up for online statements – that saves you and the company time and money and protects the environment.

7. Stop buying bottled water – I know the water from your sink just does not taste exactly the same but when filtered it’s equally healthy for you and does not produce all that thrash.

8. Dispose of unwanted items properly – old tvs, cellphones and other electronics come to mind. There are programs of proper disposal, recycling, and even reuse. One example if old cell phones for military personnel. Even if it means holding on to an item an extra week or two put your best effort in trying to pass it to somebody who will use it. Donate your old clothes that you don’t use to charity.

9. Share – before you buy this new book try the local library first. Share it with a friend. Resell it or donate it once you are done.

10. Try to influence the people around you to do the same – Remember word of mouth is the best marketing. Try to suggest new ways of doing things to the people around you without being too pushy. Respect their ways.

That’s my list of suggestions. I hope this helps and if you have any other ideas feel free to share them.

It is hard to overstate the importance of testing before going live with a website or a web application. The rule of thumb is that whatever can go wrong will at exactly the most crucial moment. The problem is that your staging environment is inadequate and fails to replicate real scenarios. That’s where JMeter comes useful.

The open source load testing tool is written Java and allows testing functional behavior and performance under variable loads. Originally developed for testing Web Application JMeter has expanded and works with different servers and protocols: HTTP, HTTPS, SOAP, Database via JDBC, LDAP, JMS, mail through POP and IMAP. The tool is highly customizable and includes pluggable architecture as well as numerous built-in features like randomizers, timers, logic controllers, regular expression handling etc. The data collection,  analysis and visualization tools make it easy to get results fast come to valuable conclusions of the overall quality of your product. The tool comes as a desktop application with a clean, easy to use GUI. While it is not a browser (certain aspects as rendering, JavaScript execution are not covered)  it behaves as such as far as the remote client is concerned. It handles cookie and session management in full multithreading which allows concurrent sampling.

The user can write a test script or record one through the use of the built-in HTTP proxy server and then modify the parameters of the communication with the server (HTTP headers, request type and request parameters). To get started just download JMeter and read the JMeter Tutorial as well as the official documentation.

To get everything started we’ll prepare a web form in pure XHTML which submits the content entered by the user via POST submit to our script which will assemble the message and send it. Our script will utilize the PHP mail function so you will have that functionality enabled on your server in order to send email messages. In PHP this configuration is done in php.ini in a section called [mail function]. I am not going to get into great details but in short there will be three settings : SMTP, sendmail_from, and sendmail_path that you will have to configure. If you are configuring a Windows machine you would want to set the SMTP section to your outgoing SMTP server whereas UNIX and Linux users will have to set sendmail_path to make use of the sendmail program unless you don’t have sendmail installed or will prefer use SMTP anyway. In either case sendmail_from will refer to the email address that will appear as the default in the from section.

Getting Started:

In order to make it easier for the user to create messages from scratch we’ll provide an XHTML form with the following fields: email (that will be the sender’s email), subject, text content, and html content. Alternatively you can provide a field for the recipient(s) email but for spam purposes our public form will not utilize that. You can easily refactor it and provide that functionality by adding a single field.

<input name="email" size="20" type="text" />
<input name="subject" size="20" type="text" />
<textarea cols="40" rows="10" name="messageplain"></textarea>
<textarea cols=40 rows=10 name="messagehtml"></textarea>

Here is the full XHTML page with the form. Please ignore the plain styling – you can easily override the CSS and create some fancy styling. I will strongly suggest if doing that to get everything working first.
As you can see our form element uses the POST method and submits to the next part of our discussion: the mail.php document containing our message assembly and submission code
<form action="mail.php" method="POST">

Now let’s look closer at what happens behind the scenes and how our message gets processed. To be able to successfully accomplish our goal we need to examine the anatomy of an email message. An email consists of three components:

• the envelope – includes routing information for your message and is used by the MTA to transfer your email over the network. Typically you don’t need to be concerned with the envelope as it is not visible by the user.
• the headers – the headers are the most intererting part of an email containing processing information. Some are mandatory: Date From, To, (or BCC) while others are optional: Subject, Cc, Reply-To, Received, Message-Id.
• the message body – this is the section with the actual content of your email message. The body is separated from the headers by a single blank line.

First we need to create our mail headers correctly. Let’s look at an example of what our headers need to look like:

From: <admin@nedkoko.com>
To: <recipient@domain.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=”fU3W4Vzr4G3D54f3″

Keep in mind that this is a simplified version of the headers but it works great for the purposes of our demonstration. Note that for content type “multipart/mixed” is used to send messages with different Content-Type sections (usually attachments) but for our purposes we want to use “multipart/alternative” which signifies different (“alternative”) versions of the same content.
Ok, now that we know what our headers need to look like we can start our form processing by extracting the content from our submission:

$email = $_POST['email'];
$to = 'nedko1@yahoo.com';
$subject = $_POST['subject'];
$messageplain = $_POST['messageplain'];
$messagehtml = $_POST['messagehtml'];

Now that we have our form content we need to create our boundary for separating the different parts of the message. A good way to do that is to use some kind of hashing which will guarantee uniqueness and will be different for each message. For that purpose i decided to use and MD5 hash algorithm applied on the current timestamp. That will satisfy our requirements and provide a 128bit value we can use for separation.
$mime_boundary = "----=_NextPart_X[".md5(time())."]";.
Let’s proceed next with creating a nice little header based on what we have so far:

$headers = "From: <admin@nedkoko.com>\r\n".
"To: <".$to."> \r\n".
"MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n" .
"Content-Type: multipart/alternative; ".
"boundary=\"".$mime_boundary."\"\r\n";

As you notice the “boundary” is not a separate header as it’s not separated on a new line as the specs require. That is because it is considered as a part of the “Content-Type”. It’s time to pay more attention to our actual message which will follow our headers separated by a blank line. Since we have multiple sections of our message body we will start each section with “–” followed by the boundary, followed by the content type and encoding. As we have two sections: text and HTML versions we start with the text:

“–”.$mime_boundary.”\r\n”.
“Content-Type: text/plain; charset=\”utf-8\”\r\n”.
“Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable\r\n\r\n”.
$messageplain.”\r\n\r\n”.

Then we do the same with the HTML version. Again we provide “–” with the boundary, content type and then the encoding:

"--".$mime_boundary."\r\n".
"Content-Type: text/html; charset=\"utf-8\"\r\n".
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\r\n\r\n".
$messagehtml."\r\n\r\n".

Looks like we are finished with both versions of the message so now we have to wrap it up and specify that this is the end of our body content:

"--".$mime_boundary."--\r\n";

Note that the end is demarcated by “–” both in front and after the boundary, making if different from separator between different parts of the body. Finally, we can apply some basic form validation (optional but recommended) and call the mail function to process our mail request. It is important to mention that the mail function can be invoked with @ in order to suppress any errors it generates. Even better it returns a boolean value specifying if the message was successfully sent so we can then include some extra logic to provide feedback to the user.

if (mail($to,$subject,$message, $headers))
{
echo "<h4>Your message was sent successfully. </h4>";
}

Mission accomplished! Here you can download a zip of the full mail.php as well as see the full working version in action here. Hope this quick introduction has shed more light into email message formats and specifics of MIME.

Style and Design – be attractive

This is the start of any successful and even decent blog. In order to attract visitors and eventually regular readers you will need to start with the basics – the building blocks. Regardless of whether you have a custom solution or a hosted blog somewhere it is really important early on in the game to start with clean, organized, and well styled blog which is easy to read. This first step will improve the usability and will help boost your credibility as a content provider. To read more on usability visit Jacob Nielsen’s website. Furthermore you can use one of the thousands of ready templates available online or create your own.

Content – it’s all about what you have to offer

In order to best serve your visitors you need to provide the right content. One way is to target specific audience by providing specialized information. That will be your niche and most of your readers will be return visitors interested in that topic. Another approach will be to provide original content or opinions on something widely publicized. When providing content make sure you are not ‘borrowing’ somebody else’s thought and ideas. Here is a list of the 12 DOs and DON’Ts with regards to copyright.

Know your audience – the customer is king

In order to be a successful blogger you will need to possess qualities like dedication, passion and endurance. Remember that blogging is not a sprint but a marathon and only the fittest survive. Therefore getting familiar with your traffic is your responsibility. Start by using some of the available tools to obtain data and measure key statistics about the people visiting your blog. Who are your visitors? Where do they come from? How do they find your content? What do they read and how long? How many repeating visitors you have? Answering questions like these can be crucial to being successful. A simple example will be knowing how many people are subscribed to your RSS feeds. In order to obtain traffic data use one of the numerous tools like Google Analytics, Feed Burner or your web server stats (here is a tool for Apache)

Arm Yourself – use all the tools at your convenience

Use the tools that will help you improve your site and make it easily accessible. For a starter you can make your blog URLs more user and search engine friendly by using permalinks. This makes your pages easier to remember, bookmark, and find by search engine. Here is a short permalinks guide for WordPress. Another great think that you can use to your advantage is to provide RSS feeds of your blog. This can be done either independently or linked through Feed Burner for advanced capabilities and tracking purposes. For added value or “bonus points” so to say it will be nice to include podcasts and/or videos to your blog. And if you still have not had enough you can include to your blog the rest of the bells and whistles out there – featured article plugins, social bookmarking tools like links to del.icio.us, Digg etc. You can also take the initiative and post your blog on any of those sites and even more (BlogsOfTheDay, Technorati and others).

In Conclusion…

In conclusion I want to re-iterate by saying that i can’t possibly stress enough how important following the rules above is to your final success. As simple as those basic directions might seem they are very often ignored or followed wrong. Remember: create a welcoming blog, be original and creative, don’t steal other people’s content, get to know your audience, use all the tools that can possibly help you attract more readers. Make sure you keep the two-way communication with your readers by providing feedback to their comments and repsonding to emails. Feels free to add more to the topic by posting comments below. Happy Blogging!