Web and RTL languages

One day you may be facing the fact that you have to deal with RTL language support on your web page. I'm not writing how to do it, you can google about it. Instead, I'm giving you a hint that does not pop out of google that easily:

In case of RTL there are still some texts that need to be kept LTR: company names, numbers etc. I suggest you to surround these texts with special characters in your HTML code:


‭‭myLTRtext in RTL language‬


Where:
‭‭ - left-to-right override
‬‬ - pop directional formatting (a formatting character that cancels a previous bi-directional formatting character on the same line in plain text)

More info on more of these special characters can be found:
https://listserv.heanet.ie/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9605&L=HTML-WG&F=P&P=4668

Without these surrounding markers I've personally experienced some really strange layout bugs in IE.

Command line Spring application configuration

This is basically just a reminder for myself, no I wouldn't have to "invent" it all over again. Most of the time I'm writing web application but occasionally have need for command line app. To keep it simple and clean, here is the application-context.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
    http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.5.xsd
    http://www.springframework.org/schema/context
    http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-2.5.xsd">

  <context:annotation-config />
  <context:component-scan base-package="ee.myapp.commandline" />

  <context:property-placeholder location="classpath:application.properties" />

  <bean id="dataSource" class="org.springframework.jdbc.datasource.DriverManagerDataSource">
    <property name="driverClassName" value="${jdbc.driverClassName}" />
    <property name="url" value="${jdbc.url}" />
    <property name="username" value="${jdbc.username}" />
    <property name="password" value="${jdbc.password}"/>
  </bean>
</beans>

And here is the main class to run it all:

public class CLI {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    GenericApplicationContext context = new GenericApplicationContext();
    
    ClassPathBeanDefinitionScanner scanner = new ClassPathBeanDefinitionScanner(context);
    // scan for properties file
    scanner.scan("conf");

    BeanDefinitionReader reader = new XmlBeanDefinitionReader(context);
    reader.loadBeanDefinitions("application-context.xml");
    context.refresh();
  }
}

That way Spring nicely initialize all the bean defined in context and also load property placeholder and does annotation based component scan.