With some help from Ryan Lubke, a number of issues have been fixed in the RI Sandbox, including:

• “Standard” Attribute Support
• Update various CSS files
• Make the tabs default to something prettier

and several minor fixes here and there. Having done that, I’ve bumped the version (which I have been awful at maintain thus the jump from 0.1 to the seemingly arbitrary 0.7) to 0.8, leaving us with this road map.

• 0.9
  • Custom icons in the TreeView (587)
  • Slider component (590)
• 1.0
  • Fix HtmlEditor 404s (594)
  • Possible DataTable component (591)
• Post 1.0
  • Lazy loading the tree (588)
  • Animations (585)
  • MyFaces support (564 - I may just make these all 1.2-only since MyFaces 1.2 finally appears to be close)

If you have any comments, questions, suggestions, etc., please let me know here or in the issue tracker.

Popularity: 7% [?]

As I’ve noted previously, a recent job change has required that I become familiar with Oracle’s application server, Oracle Containers for Java, or OC4J. I recently set aside time to set up my OC4J environment to test a prototype I have been working on and have running under GlassFish. After getting the server installed and logging on to the administration console, I was struck by how nice it was. I’ve long held that one of the many strengths GlassFish has over its open source competition is a vastly superior administration console. Presented now with a commercial application server with the might of a company like Oracle behind it, how well does GlassFish stand up¹? In this entry, I’d like to take a look at that question. Since a Java EE container is a complicated piece of software, an exhaustive comparison of any two such containers is an overwhelming task. In the interest of brevity, we’ll take a look at just a couple of areas², and wrap things up with some general observations. (more…)

Popularity: 15% [?]

For my record setting, third blog in a single day, I thought I’d make a quick update on the state of the RI Sandbox components. Just a couple of days ago, a former coworker started asking questions about my download component, which made me realize that I should probably find some time to do some work on them. As a general rule, they’re all fairly usable, with some gotchas here and there, as Brent was discovering. Given my desire to see a 1.0 release, it’s time to address those issues. (more…)

Popularity: 6% [?]

The JSFTemplating team is proud to announce that a new, Facelets-compatible format has been added to JSFTemplating and has reached the beta stage. Not all of the Facelets components are currently supported; those that are currently supported are ui:component, ui:decorate, ui:include, ui:define, and ui:remove, with the addition of a new ui:event, which brings the power of JSFTemplating’s events to this new Facelets format. In addition other JSFTemplating features are also available to Facelets pages, such as “pageSession” (i.e. #{pageSession.variable}) and ability to reference relative information like $this{componentId}.

Please remember that this is beta software, but should be stable enough to support the basic Facelets functionality (note that we do not yet have support for Facelets tag handlers, etc). Should you find a bug in this new format, please file an issue against it on the issue tracker.

If you would like to see a demo of the functionality, we have deployed an application that shows the exact same templates as processed by Facelets itself as well as JSFTemplating, thus showing how well the implementations match up. As the implementation matures, this application will be updated to show the current state.

If you have questions or comments, please join the discussion on the dev mailing list. You might also be able to catch one of the developers on irc.freenode.net in #jsftemplating.

Popularity: 10% [?]

I recently made a change that I should probably note here: In mid-May, I left my employer of the past 2+ years, IEC, to join Objectstream as a Software Architect, and for whom I will be working at the FAA’s Mike Monroney Aernoautical Center here in Oklahoma City. While I’m very excited about this opportunity (and have enjoyed the past few weeks), it was not an easy decision to leave IEC, as it’s a really great place to work. IEC (and my boss, Mitch, in particular) gave me a degree of freedom in terms of technology that I’ve not had anywhere else. I was able to try a lot of bleeding edge technologies and do some really neat stuff with some really sharp people. Much of what you may have read here came from my experiences at IEC. (more…)

Popularity: 6% [?]