The Bull Og

Just registered for Bay to Breakers. Do I have a costume? No. Am I in good enough shape to run 12K? Eh… I’m sure it’s going to be a blast.

Alright, I’ve got this web service set up to serve back JSON when a link is clicked. Working in Firefox 1.5+? You bet. IE 6? No. I ping the web service with the browser and what do I get?

Content-Type image/gif is not supported.

Sure enough in Catalyst, I see the following in the logs:

Could not find a serializer for an empty content type

Am I to understand then that the Accept header of the XMLHttpRequest object in IE uses a default of “image/gif”?!?

Sure enough, I made the following change in my REST controller and the JSON service worked:

__PACKAGE__->config(
          serialize => {
              'stash_key' => 'rest',
              'map'       => {
                  'text/xml'           => 'JSON',
                  'text/x-json'        => 'JSON',
                  'image/gif'          => 'JSON',
              },
         }
);

One of the reasons I’ve posted so infrequently recently is because:

1. work’s been crazy busy and
2. I discovered Selenium and also a way to test a Catalyst app with Selenium

Both took a while to get running right on my RHEL 4 box but when they did, wow! Impressive white box testing.

Today I celebrate one year at Yahoo! It’s hard to believe that it’s
gone so fast. In the last year, I’ve grown so much as a web
developer and so much has happened at Yahoo; not the least of which
being the Microsoft bid which we thankfully have behind us.

When I think about how I’ve grown, I’m so much faster in engineering
software partly thanks to Catalyst, my knowledge of SOA and AJAX is so
much better, my MySQL chops have advanced, and my code is more robust
thanks to Selenium. Of course, I have to give credit to my teammates
for assisting me in the process. When you’re surrounded by top talent
and have mammoth challenges, you rise to your potential.

Has the smart client arrived as predicted?