After having recently audited a web application for proper character encoding support, I have one piece of advice for web developers in this area and that is: you should always support UTF-8 encoding across the board right from the start.

If you just take a few steps at the beginning of a project to enable Unicode encoding, you won’t ever have to worry about international character support, your application is “future-proofed.” When the time comes for your application to go global, it’s ready to go.

For example, if you use PHP you can set the encoding with the following statement in your php.ini file:
default_charset = "utf-8"

Or with Java set the following jvm setting:
-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8

In your Apache config file, set:
AddCharset UTF-8 .utf8
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8


You also need to set the database encoding to match up. In MySQL you can do this by setting the following directive in your my.cnf file:
default-character-set=utf8

It is important to note that you also need to specify the encoding for the connection. For a JDBC connection you can do this by adding the following parameters to the database URL:
useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8&characterSetResults=UTF-8

Finally, if you are going to be sending emails from an application, you will want to specify the encoding in the Mime type as well. Using JavaMail, this can be done while setting the text of a MimeBodyPart:
mimeBodyPart.setText(htmlContent, MimeUtility.getDefaultJavaCharset(), "html");

If you make a concerted effort to implement the same encoding across the board, it will certainly help in the long run, as you won’t ever have to deal with character encoding issues.

For more information and specifics about UTF-8 encoding, visit UTF-8: The Secret of Character Encoding

For the past couple months, I’ve been working on a web site for my cousin, basketball coach and author Brian McCormick. The site centers around his latest book, 180 Shooter: 5 Steps to Shooting 90% from the Free Throw Line, 50% from the Floor and 40% from the 3-Point Line.

My favorite part of the job was creating the shot tracker program, which is an interactive shot chart, similar to the one shown at left. Coaches can input their players’ makes and misses with a rich user interface, tracking a wide variety of criteria such as opponent, quarter, shot type, etc. The coach can then report on the players’ shooting statistics, broken down by these criteria, and visualize that data in a heat map overlay. The result is knowing exactly where and under what conditions their players should take their shots.

There’s also a great individual practice program, which helps players follow along with the drills outlined in the 180 Shooter book. The program guides players towards practice in the necessary areas to improve their shooting. I would recommend for anyone wanting to become a better basketball shooter, you should check out this web site.

For almost 2 years, I’ve been working on a product called Email Center Pro – anyone who reads this blog probably already knows that. It’s an email management solution for small to medium sized businesses that makes it super easy for a group of people to manage hundreds, even thousands of emails a day.

This is a big week, because we just launched version 2.0 of the software to our user base. The new version has a completely rewritten JavaScript client and makes use of an entirely new RESTful web services API. It’s got a lot of powerful new search features and introduces the dashboard which will soon allow users to customize their home page with analytics tools. 2.0 is a big step forward but it also lays the groundwork for the exciting things Email Center Pro will do in the very near future.

For anyone who has a web site, manages more than one email address, or has at least one other person involved with their business, I would whole-heartedly recommend this product. Sure, I may be biased, but I have seen first-hand the real gains in efficiency that it provides for an organization.

I’ve recently been doing quite a bit of work with Amazon Web Services. Over the past few weeks I have been developing a simple way to manage multi-node applications using EC2. Much of this is very project-specific but the methodology could easily be applied to a wide variety of deployments. The techniques described here were inspired by this blog post. This article is intended for people who are already somewhat familiar with Amazon Web Services — for a brief introduction to S3 and EC2, view my previous blog post. If you’re ready for it, read on.

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