2009

Drupal's page cache stores fully-built pages for quick delivery to anonymous visitors to your site. However, any change to your site's content clears the cache soon afterwards. The next visitor to each page must wait for the page to be rebuilt fresh. For some pages, such as long view lists, this may take a few seconds. This article shows how to completely rebuild the page cache automatically so that visitors are always delivered cached pages quickly.

Java has several ways to parse integers from strings. Performance differences between these methods can be significant when parsing a large number of integers. Doing your own integer parsing can provide an important speed boost. This tip looks at five ways to parse integers, compares their features, and benchmarks them to see which method is the fastest.

Default Drupal, Apache, and PHP settings broadcast to hackers much more about your site's configuration than hackers should know. In this third article in a series, I review settings to tighten security and reduce this information leakage.

Drupal's default settings provide rather loose security. In this second article in a series, I review Drupal configuration changes to tighten security and control who can create and view content.

Default configurations of Apache, PHP, and Drupal often serve files they shouldn't. In this first article in a series, I review configuration changes to tighten security by limiting access to files and directories for a Drupal web site served by Apache.

Java's Swing JSlider creates a sliding widget for selecting a number within a fixed range. The sliding "thumb" icon, the track it slides on, tick marks, and labels may be turned on and off, but Swing has no other methods to affect the appearance of a JSlider. That's left up to the current look and feel. This article shows how to use Apple's "Mac OS X" look and feel for Java on a Mac to create smaller JSliders and switch between two thumb icon styles. The article also shows work-arounds for controlling tick and label sizes and colors.

Grouping together related components helps organize a user interface and make it easier to learn and use. Java provides several border styles for outlining groups, but none of them match the Mac's recessed style. This article shows how to create a recessed border using special UI defaults available to Mac Java applications.

Windows automatically adds a window frame to all Java windows, but there is more that you can do to make sure Java windows look and feel right on Windows XP, Vista, 7, and beyond. This article discusses Swing settings to control the appearance of window decorations on a PC.

The Mac automatically adds a Mac-style window frame to all Java windows, but there is more that you can do to make sure Java windows look and feel right on a Mac. This article discusses Swing settings and Mac-specific client properties to control the appearance of window decorations on a Mac.