Spartan Java

Using a nice AJAX auto completable input box is much nicer (for the user) than a combo box with 100 options. If you use jQuery, you may use a quite easy yet powerful plug-in called jquery.autocomplete (original, eh?). Grab it at http://www.pengoworks.com/workshop/jquery/autocomplete.htm.
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I guess in more than one time you needed to display some text in a space where it not always will fit. For example graphical designers love to lay out lists and tables and purposely forget about how long each field will really be ;)

A solution I like is to display always a fixed number of characters and add the full text as a title (mouse over display). A really easy way to do this is using the substring function from the JSTL functions library, for example:

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<span title="${myBean.myProp}">
${fn:substring(myBean.myProp,0,25)}
</span>