In my ongoing efforts to learn the JSF framework as thoroughly as possible, I decided to write a component, but, with the myriad of high quality components available, what was left for me to do? At the suggestion of my brother, who has been watching a similar effort underway in the Wicket space, I’ve decided to wrap Yahoo’s UI library. The problem I ran into pretty quickly, though, was that the documentation wasn’t too clear as to what I needed to make it happen (though it’s quite likely I was having an obtuse moment or three). There are a plethora of resources that discuss what needs to be done, but all seemed either incomplete or too disjointed (see disclaimer above). So, to help ameliorate that, let’s walk through wrapping Yahoo’s calendar component as a JSF component, step by step. Before I go much further, though, I must note that I am by no means an expert in this, so it’s likely that you’re going to see some less than ideal examples. So, without further ado…
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Popularity: 12% [?]

Friday I had an interesting discussion with my boss, Mitch. I have been doing a lot of thinking about Java EE 5 and what it offers, and that has me reevaluating some of our technology decisions. Most notably, which was the bulk of my discussion with Mitch, is, “Do we really need Spring anymore?”
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Popularity: 4% [?]

As part of our migration to Glassfish, one of my tasks is to migrate all of the web services we’ve exposed via Mule to a session bean environment, which won’t be too hard since we only have two such deployments. The code changes are really pretty small, but non-obvious (given my nascent EJB3 knowledge). For those that might be in a similar situation, let’s take a quick look at what this process entailed.
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Popularity: 3% [?]

A reader brought to my attention that I have never posted the code to FacesUtil, a convenience class used, for example, in my JSF, PhaseListeners, and GET Requests article, so I’ll fix that oversight now. Before I get to the code, though, let me preface it by saying this: This code has grown as several developers have hacked on it, so it my not be consistent, and probably doesn’t embody any sort of best practices. It does, however, work well for us, and that’s our primary concern. Note also, that this code has not been updated to the 1.2 specification yet, so you’ll at least get warnings if not errors should you use this in a 1.2 environment. I am currently in the process of updating the class, but, for now, here it is in its current state.
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Popularity: 8% [?]

Sometimes, when developing a JSF application, it would be nice not to have to wait for your favorite container to start up. That’s especially true if your container is a full JEE stack like Glassfish or JBoss. Likewise, there are times when you might need to embed a web application in another, say some server process or desktop application. While there are a number of options available, I’d like to demonstrate how to embed a simple JSF application using the Winstone Servlet Container. To help demonstrate how this is done, we’ll use a well know sample application: Duke’s guessNumber game, and, to make things even more interesting, we’ll convert the application to use Facelets (mostly because I love Facelets, but partly because I didn’t care to figure out how to make Winstone compile JSPs ).
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Popularity: 3% [?]