Equal height HTML elements in a container with CSS

Task: create HTML elements that contain other elements and adjust their height to surrounding container. No Javascript allowed. That's surprisingly hard; height:100% won't work; elements generally wrap their contents tightly and don't extend to their parents height dimension. Illustrating the problem: three elements inside a surrounding container Css-tricks lists several ways [1] to get this … Continue reading Equal height HTML elements in a container with CSS →

Advanced web security topics

(Updated 22 May 2020) This post discusses web security issues that I come across - so far thankfully mostly by reading about them. It is a work in progress which I'll keep updating. The post title includes "advanced" because the topics discussed here involve clever, non-trivial hacks, are novel at the time of their publication … Continue reading Advanced web security topics →

End-to-end testing Java web applications with an embedded Tomcat

In this instalment on assembly testing [1] I'll talk about how automated system tests run over my Java web applications. The set-up is rather cheap, not very labour-intensive and can incrementally evolve from a simple assembly test (aka smoke test) to a full-fledged system test. Since this post is rather concrete naming tools and frameworks, … Continue reading End-to-end testing Java web applications with an embedded Tomcat →

Heisenbugs with angular.js and Internet Explorer 9 or: missing console.log

I'm developing a proof of concept web application based on angular.js for corporate users, which - as so often in my career - means that they are using Internet Explorer. Several users complained about sporadic failures which were really hard to pin down, but during debugging sessions boiled down to a simple observation: the errors … Continue reading Heisenbugs with angular.js and Internet Explorer 9 or: missing console.log →

AngularJS, Internet Explorer 9 and watch error

While working on an enterprise project (of course...) I run into an error with Angular (1.3.13), Internet Explorer 9 and $watch-ing a scope when programming a directive: TypeError: Object doesn't support property or method 'watch' I'll never find out what the reason is. The collective wisdom of Angular users claims that including JQuery solves … Continue reading AngularJS, Internet Explorer 9 and watch error →