Game g = new Game();

Facing the question how to implement a basic survey functionality within a web application, I had several options:

• Implementing a new system from scratch
• Linking to an external hosted system
• Integrating an existing 3rd party survey tool into the web application

The survey features were important, but would not justify a big amount of workload, so implementing a new system from scratch (that would give enough flexibilty to support different types of question types and complex ways of analyzing results) was out of the question.

The downside of this decision was that the survey administration will not be integrated into the rest of the administration interface, but we could live with that.

Linking to an external hosted system (like SurveyMonkey or SurveyGizmo) sounded nice, but I needed to be able to control access to the survey via tokens – so that a single user could answer a certain survey only once by using a token issued to him by me.

Most of the external hosted survey tools have no problem using tokens, but I needed to dynamically generate this token within my web application right before I send the user the invitation to answer the survey, so I needed to be able to insert new tokens at runtime from my application – and could not figure out how to do that using a hosted system.

By integrating an existing solution, I would be able to have direct access to the (local) database, inserting tokens on the fly.

What I ended up doing was using the open source LimeSurvey. It’s a standard PHP/mySQL application, and seems like the defacto standard solution for surveys on the web.

LimeSurvey can serve all sorts of question types, and – most importantly – use tokens to control access to restricted, non-anonymous surveys.

These tokens are stored in DB tables named tokens_<SURVEYID> whereas <SURVEYID> is (you guessed it) the numerical ID of the survey.

Now, if you construct the SQL update statement manually, it’s pretty easy to concat the survey ID into the statement string, but since I was already using Hibernate, I wanted to refrain from hardcoding SQL in my application.

After some research, I implemented a custom Hibernate Interceptor, which allowed me to insert the surveyID into the SQL-string on the fly without any other hassle.

I will write more about how we use and trigger the survey invitations in a later post.

Well, another relaunch of me trying to write blog posts more regularly – what can I say…

I got a new job, more about this soon (maybe).

Read about and created a (free) account on Legend Online – it’s an RPG played in your browser. You solve quests by… waiting. Until a progress bar fills up. That’s right, no frantic mouse button smashing, no grouping, no fights for the best loot… just patience.

One step up from Progress Quest – but not more

I just stumbled across the little “imgtype=face” option for Google’s image search – it let’s you search for (you guessed it) just faces.

Conspiracy theory galore, here we go…

Mingle 2.0 has been released – and it has the one big thing that I was missing the most in the previous version: to be able to model hierarchical card relationships.
5 users are still free forever, so I will check it out soon.

For the record – I think I’m too old to enjoy Facebook.

I’m uberfordert with the enormous amount of new requests everday, for new applications I should install and give access to my data, just to forget about them in the next minute, for 10 variations of the same functionality put into different applications that look and sound the same, but aren’t. I don’t want to give virtual flowers, smacks, beers, hugs, ass kicks, farts, money or whatever.

I don’t need a social network to compare my taste in music, movies, games, flowers to people I have never met in real life. And for the people I DID meet, we’ve sorted these things out, already, so whats the f-ing point?

I don’t want to rate how sexy my female co-workers are (and risk being sued for sexual harassment). Oh, and that applies to male co-workers as well!!

I see the need for networks like LinkedIn or Xing (which I still refer to as “ksing”, and not “crossing”, ignoring all the comments from the wiseasses around *g*), I use them regularly, even found my current job through one of them.

I’ve used sites like tupalo.com enough to see the benefits for me, especially when wandering around in an area of a city I’m not familiar with.

But I decided I just don’t get anything out of Facebook or Myspace or any other of that “fun” social networks. Period. Twitter me an oldfashioned twat, I guess I can live with it