Additional information regarding my "Ajax enabled JSP controls" series on IBM DeveloperWorks

Background Information

I've received a few inquiries regarding the "Ajax enabled JSP controls" series I wrote for the IBM DeveloperWorks site.

For those interested, below are the article links. You can also find the links on my Published Article page.

• Building Ajax-enabled JSP TagLib controls, Part 1: Auto-complete and cascading drop-down controls (IBM DeveloperWorks, September 2008)
• Building Ajax-enabled JSP TagLib controls, Part 2: Auto-populate and field validator controls (IBM DeveloperWorks, November 2008)
• Building Ajax-enabled JSP TagLib controls, Part 3: Should be published soon

Setting up the Development Environment

I wanted to provide a bit more information on the software requirements and configuration parameters. First, I used Eclipse 3.4.0, Apache Tomcat 6.0.18, and MySQL 5.0.67, although any IDE, Java Application Server, or Database Server will suffice. Nothing in the code is specific to any of the above mentioned components, except for the data provider implementation and JDBC configuration parameters.

Below are a few guidelines for integrating the controls into any Java EE based web project.

1. Setup the database - Please use the scripts provided with articles if you are using MySQL
2. Configure the JDBC data source - Please refer to vendor-specific documentation on how to configure your data source. For Apache Tomcat, the data source connection parameters are specified in the server.xml
3. Ensure that the JDBC drivers are in the Application Server's classpath.The exact location differs for each Application Server. For Apache Tomcat, the directory is "%TOMCAT%\lib".
   
4. Be sure to put the Tag Library Definition file in the tlds in WEB-INF

If you have any other questions regarding the series, please let me know. Also, if anyone has feedback regarding the controls or are using/planning to use the controls in their solution, I would be interested in knowing that as well. 

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