Today at 1:00PM CST, the GlassFish team will host a webinar discussing the asadmin utility that ships with GlassFish. Here’s the official annoucment by Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart (webified be me : ):

This week’s webinar set presents ASadmin, the GlassFish administration CLI. The GlassFish GUI console is well designed and very well appreciated by the users but GUIs are not best for automation and power users tend to use CLIs for that reason. The ASadmin console has been called the “hidden gem” in GlassFish; hopefully this webinar will make it a bit less hidden.

The presenter is the asadmin lead, Jane Young. We are likely to also have a panel on the value of asadmin with two non-Sun heavy users of asadmin: Dan Allen and Dick Davies.

This is a free, online, presentation. The presentation will be recorded and made available later for replays.

Presentation Date/Time:
Jan 22nd, 11amPT – Other TZs
Online at Ustream.

Concall for Speakers (others, please mute with *6)
Toll Free: (866) 545-5227
Int’l Access: (215) 446-3648 (caller paid)
Access Code: 3535518

Additional details here

Popularity: 8% [?]

If you are a member of a JUG (or happen to run one) and would like to be able to join the Java Community Process (JCP), you now have two options. For US-based JUGs, you can affiliate yourself with the new umbrella JUG-USA. According to Van Riper of the Silicon Valley JUG and the coordinator of the JUG-USA effort, all you need to do to be affiliated with JUG-USA is promise to link back to the JUG-USA Map and let him know. As an affiliated JUG, you have access to the JCP, including JSR submission as well as Expert Group membership, through JUG-USA. If, however, you’d like to have your JUG become a member directly, which is currently the only option (that I know of) for non-US JUGs, you can follow these directions (thanks, again, to Van Riper):

If you want to do this, it is actually quite easy to do and the process is fairly well documented here for organizations joining the JCP:

http://jcp.org/en/participation/membership2

You simply follow the 6 steps listed on the page above. Since JUGs are being given special treatment with organization membership fees waived, two of these steps are a bit fuzzy. I had a chance to talk to Patrick Curran at the recent JCP Birthday Party to clear up the fuzziness though. So, follow the 6 steps with these two clarifications:

A. You can skip step 4. You should not initial *any* of the listed “Process Cost Sharing” choices on page 3 of the agreement. There is none that apply to our special situation.

B. For step 6, you do need to fill out *both* sections on page 11 of the agreement. Even though your JUG membership cost will be zero, Patrick indicated that they will need the “Accounts Payable Contact Person” section filled in. However, that person won’t be receiving a bill or the bill will have an invoice amount of zero.

Once you have completed the agreement, you follow the instructions on this page to either FAX it or mail it to the JCP Management Office for processing:

http://jcp.org/en/participation/membership_submit

That is all there is to it. As a point of reference, my individual membership agreement was processed in just two days time after faxing it in. It is possible that organization memberships will take longer to process than that. If you do not get confirmation back within a week, I would contact the JCP Management Office to check on your membership processing.

The Oklahoma City Java Users Group, Inc. will be utilizing both methods.

Popularity: 8% [?]

As I noted in a recent entry, we are considering moving to a desktop-like interface for the GlassFish Administration Console, where the content is in separate “windows” (decorated DIVs, basically) which can be moved, closed, minimized, etc. As I’ve started working on a concrete implementation of some of those ideas, I quickly realized that we were going to have issues with multiple, overlapping windows. Once you have multiple windows open, the user has to be able to bring the desired window to the front, but YUI, which will likely be the library used, doesn’t support that natively. Fortunately, that’s easy to fix. First, an example of the problem:

Overlapping window example

With stock YUI, as best as I can tell, if you want to look at Window #2, you’re out luck. With this simple JS, though, the problem is quickly solved:

    var currentMaxZ = 1;

    registerPanel = function(id, panel) {
        scalesPanels[id] = panel;
        YAHOO.util.Event.addListener(id, "mousedown", bringToFront);

        currentMaxZ++;
    }

    setZToMax = function (target) {
        YAHOO.util.Dom.setStyle(target, 'z-index', ++currentMaxZ);
    }

    bringToFront = function (event) {
        setZToMax(event.target.parentNode.parentNode);
    }

There may be more elegant approaches, but here’s how this one works. When the page first loads, the variable currentMaxZ is set to one. As each windows is registered (a requirement I put on the page), the variable is incremented, and an “onclick” handler is attached to the DOM element. Now, when someone clicks on the panel/window/dialog, whether it’s a simple click or a click to drag, bringToFront is called, which determines the actual DOM element that needs to be manipulated (due to how YUI works, the DOM isn’t as simple as it may look in your markup), then delegates to setZToMax (it’s a separate function so that other parts of Scales can reuse the functionality) which increments currentMaxZ and sets the target’s z-index style property to that value. Once that’s done, the window is brought to front, as expected.

Having worked out how to do that, I’ve added this functionality to Scales (which will likely be used in the GlassFish console, if only just for this exploration) and committed that to the repository (about which I need to post, but that will have to wait a bit longer). If you’d like to see this in action, point your browser here (there is, at the moment, an odd rendering bug I’m trying to track down) and let me know what you think.

Technorati Tags: jsf, mojarra scales

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I needed a break this afternoon, so I thought I’d see how easy it is to bootstrap a JSF 2 project. One of the biggest complaints about JSF 1.x is all that XML, so JSF 2 is aiming to fix that. How have we done so far? Based on this quick look (which is my first from-scratch JSF 2 app), really, really well. (more…)

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In a recent discussion, the fact that I have AT&T U-verse came up. I was asked what my thoughts on it are, and I promised a blog about it. This entry is the somewhat belated fulfillment of the promise.

First off, for those that don’t know, U-verse is, as best as I can tell, their answer to cable television. With the full package, which we have, you get a digital phone line, digital television, and high-speed internet all over fiber. Since the cable companies are offering telephone, it seems the phone companies are now offering television, with everyone in on this internet thing. For the impatient, the punch line here is that it’s a nice, but not perfect, offering. Let’s jump into the details. (more…)

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