Of the many great things about GlassFish, one that is often mentioned most (and is, in fact, what got me involved with GlassFish as an end user years ago) is the Administration Console. It’s an extremely powerful and capable interface, and is, if I may be so bold, orders of magnitudes better than its open source competition (it may even beat commercial competitors, but I have no experience with those). Another powerful tool in GlassFish administration is the asadmin CLI utility, which allows for quick and easy scripting of server provisioning, etc. Did you know, though, that GlassFish has a third administration interface? As of GlassFish v3, we offer a RESTful administration API, based on Jersey, to allow non-Java clients to configure the app server easily. For GlassFish 3.1, one of my main responsibilities, with the help, I should add of my coworkers Ludovic Champenois and Mitesh Meswani, has been to help improve upon the great start we had in in v3. In this entry, we’ll take a look at the current state of the interface and learn the basics of using. (more…)

Popularity: 2% [?]

In a recent forum post, a user asked how to store a Facelets file in a database. Although JSF doesn’t support this out of the box (though it would be a nice feature), it’s not too difficult to add. In this entry, I’ll show you how to serve Facelets from a JAR file, then give some thoughts that will help, I hope, implement a database-backed approach. I’ll be using JSF 2, so if you’re using Facelets 1.x with JSF 1.2, you’ll have to extend com.sun.facelets classes to make this work in that environment. With that out of the way, unto the breach! (more…)

Popularity: 4% [?]

One of the results of the Oracle purchase of Sun has been an increased focus on testing — not that we didn’t test GlassFish before, but it was mostly manual in my area of the server. The task of automating this fell to me, and, after a little — ahem — testing, I settled on Selenium. (more…)

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This is a little late notice, but we at Sun are holding a “virtual conference” covering GlassFish v3, JavaEE 6, etc. You can find details here. It starts in 30 minutes (10:00 CST, 8:00 PST).

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With the recent migration of Mojarra Scales to JSF 2, the old location of the Mojarra Scales demo was no longer adequate (upgrading that server posed some issues). For that reason, I have moved the demo to a new home. This server should be more up-to-date (both in terms of the application as well as the application server — which is GlassFish v3, of course — that runs it). When accessing the application, please keep in mind that it’s on an old server that’s running on an AT&T U-verse line, and the download times will reflect that.

I’d also like to not that this showcases a couple of new components at the moment. I’ve begun an implementation of the YUI data table widget. At the time of this posting, basic table functions work, including client-side sorting. More complex functionality, such as Ajax updates, are in the offing.

Another new component, which the demo uses extensively, is the excellent SyntaxHighligher script from Alex Gorbatchev. The demo uses this new component to show the page source for each demo, finally allowing you to see a given component in action, as well seeing the page markup that makes those components. The demo is still in flux, so some things aren’t quite “perfect” yet. For example, Safari really hates the markup the demo produces, which is a bug in the demo application itself. Hopefully, that will soon be fixed. For now, Safari users will need to use another browser.

As I’ve noted, Scales has been migrated to JSF 2. While most components are working as expected, there are likely some minor issues to work out. If you run into any of these issues, or if you’d like to see extra functionality in any of the components, please feel free to file an issue on the Scales issue tracker on the Kenai project site.

Popularity: 9% [?]

While JSF has had Ajax support for a long time now, it has always been through external libraries such as Ajax4Jsf/RichFaces, ICEfaces, DWR, DynaFaces, etc. With JSF 2, the framework now has first class, standardized support for Ajax. This is good news on several fronts. For those that want Ajax support but would rather not import another library, that capability is now baked in, and, for those familiar with a4j or DynaFaces, it should look very familiar. However, for those that don’t mind the external dependency, the standardized Ajax will make it much easier to mix and match component libraries on the same page, an issue that has plagued JSF for while. In this post, I’d like to take the first approach and show how easy it is to achieve Ajaxy updates on your h:dataTable using only standard JSF. (more…)

Popularity: 33% [?]

After a lot of changes and a long delay, I’m pleased to announce that we have released FacesTester 0.3 tonight. This version has a large number of new features. Read on the for details. (more…)

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I should note here, for those that don’t follow me on Twitter, that I have updated and expanded my About page, for those that are interested in that sort of thing. A word of warning: There’s some personal stuff in there!

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It just occurred to me that I never posted my final wrap up on JavaOne 2009. While it may be that, at this last date, no one cares anymore, I feel I should finish what I started, even if only for me. With that said, here’s my closing thoughts on what I hope is NOT the last JavaOne. (more…)

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Day 3 of JavaOne 2009, the last full day of the conference, has come and gone. Like the rest of the crowd, I began to wind down a bit early. (more…)

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