Bit of a Shocker – Tons of Broken Web Pages
Well, this morning I got a nice shocker - several of my web tools were broken in London, but working fine in Chicago. Since the server is in Chicago, I started looking at the network as the issue. Everything here worked fine, but nothing there was working. Well... the basic page was loading, but nothing else.
What a pain. I was able to see the server was up and returning data. I was able to make it work for me. But they were dead. So I asked them to have a look at the JavaScript console log in Chrome and let me know what it said.
The answer was simply astounding: it couldn't find the Java applet on the page.
Now a bit of background for this one. My web app needs to have some sense of authorization. It's got P/L data for the entire organization for a long time. There's a desire to have this somewhat controlled. OK, fine by me, corporations can choose to filter their data as they see fit. I just needed to put something into the JavaScript to make it possible to read the logged in user running the web browser (Chrome or Firefox).
I solved this a while ago, but recently my teammate Steve decided that I didn't need to have the applet tag visible, and so he changed all the applet tags from:
<applet archive="firecache.jar" code="Bridge" height=10 width=10>
to:
<applet archive="firecache.jar" code="Bridge" height=1 width=1 style="display: none;">
He said I had made a mistake in leaving it visible, and too big. I remember doing tests on it, and thought I had tested this, but hey... maybe it's an update to Chrome, and it's working better now.
Yeah... I should have trusted myself.
It's important to realize that I have a multi-level process of getting the authenticated username: first, we check for a cookie, if that's not there, then we hit the applet, and if that's not available, then we throw up a login panel. The problem was, with the applet not accessible, the JavaScript stopped at that step and we never say the login panel.
So I changed the code to ignore the cookie, and quickly reproduced the problem. Now I knew what it was. Then I changed the HTML on the page to:
<applet archive="firecache.jar" code="Bridge" height=1 width=1>
leaving it "small" is OK with me, but I have to have it "visible" so that it's accessible to the JavaScript engine.
When I did that, I had the page working again. Whew! All I had to do now was to fix up the thirty-some other pages and check it all in and put it in UAT.
It didn't take too long, but it was a pain to look stupid to the London users, but I took the bullet for Steve. It is my web app, not his, and while he didn't test his changes, I didn't either, and that's my fault. I'll be a lot more careful about Steve's work in the future.
I do not like looking stupid to the London users.