For those of you that like to hear me speak (and, yes, I’m looking at you, Mom!) I will be at JSFOne, a conference brought to you by the No Fluff Just Stuff team and dedicated to the JSF ecosystem. (more…)
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The JSF 2.0 Expert Group (operating under the auspices of JSR 314) has released Early Draft Review 1 of the upcoming revision of the spec. We are soliciting feedback, of course, and the window of opportunity for that runs through July 2. If you want to have some input on the direction of the specification, now is the time to speak up. 
The major
changes in this
release are Ajax support and
composite components.The major changes in this draft release are baked in Ajax support, and what we’ve termed “EZComp,” which is better described as composite components. Composite components, which touches on a change to finalized in a later release, namely, the inclusion of Facelets, allows a component developer to create a new component by piecing together several others in a template file. This functionality is very similar, as best as I can tell as I’ve never used them, to Facelets’ component support, where a snippet of markup is specified in a file and can then be treated as an actual component. Unlike the Facelets version, though, these composite components are “real” components in that they are backed by a UIComponent. If you were at JavaOne, this is what Ed demoed in this presentation (with Roger demonstrating the Ajax support).
There’s still much work to be done before September when we are schedule to deliver the Proposed Final Draft, but this is a pretty good start. If you have any interest at all, please review the spec and give us feedback. We really do want your input, as our goal is to improve upon the JSF experience and solve as many of the real world pain points as we can. If your favorite pain point isn’t being addressed, you owe it to yourself to speak up!
Technorati Tags: javaserver faces, jsf, jcp
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Today, I released the first release candidate for Mojarra Scales, the JSF component library I helped create. Rather than repeat myself, I’ll just paste the email announcement here: (more…)
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Today, Ryan Lubke committed code to the Mojarra tree that will allow a JSF developer to prototype and/or develop just about every JSF artifact using Groovy. When deployed to the server in development mode, the Groovy file can be changed on disk, and the changes will be picked up automatically, allowing one to avoid the compile/package/deploy cycle that can make Java web development so tedious. Once the artifact is “done,” the Groovy source can be copied to a Java source file and compiled (or the build process can compile the .groovy files to .class files) for production deployment. This could be a really nice feature for component development, for example.
For more details, including a sample NetBeans project, visit Ryan’s entry.
All around, a very, very cool enhancement. Great work, Ryan!
Technorati Tags: javaserver faces, jsf, mojarra, groovy
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In a blog entry last year, Ken Paulsen gave a short introduction to the FileStreamer utility in JSFTemplating. Since Scales is now using JSFTemplating to make the component authoring process easier, I have been able to use this facility, allowing me to deprecate some custom code. In the process of making the migration, I’ve made changes to JSFTemplating that will be of benefit to all. In this entry, I’d like to highlight those changes, and show you how you, too, can use this great facility. (more…)
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In a recent blog post, Java EE 6 (JSR 316) specification co-lead Roberto Chinnici discussed the two leading proposals for the web profile in the upcoming Java EE 6 specification (For more information about profiles, one can start with this article on TheServerSide.) The part that caught me by surprise and confuses me greatly is why the inclusion of JavaServer Faces in the web profile would be controversial. Having spoken with an expert group member, who I will not out :), the argument comes down to this: “We shouldn’t force a broken technology, that is not the clear winner on people.” I think that’s a very interesting statement, in that it precludes doing just about anything in the spec. (more…)
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At the lunch session of the OKC JUG today, a question was asked about the difference between the valueChangeListener attribute and <f:valueChangeListener/>. That is,
and
The question was, which is “better?” There was also a question if the latter form automatically handled the JS on the parent component. I will now attempt to answer those questions now.
(more…)
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One of my long-standing complaints with Ant is that project dependency management is non-existent in the core Ant distribution. Many will quickly point to the Maven Ant tasks, but I’ve never been really fond of them for one reason or another. The other advice I often get is to use Ivy, but even after several attempts, I had never gotten Ivy to work. With the recent release of 2.0 beta 1, though, I thought I’d try again, and I’m glad I did. Not only have I gotten it to work for me, but I was also able to successfully configure custom resolvers. Below is what I had to do to migrate the Mojarra Scales dependency management to Ivy. (more…)
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In my last post, I alluded to some refactoring done inside the Sandbox/Scales library to simplify the components’ code. If you are interested in learning more about what was done, and how you can apply the same techniques to your own JSF components, please see this article, written by Ken Paulsen and myself, with editing help from Rick Palkovic, which shows how one can use JSFTemplating and some (currently “private”) annotations from the Woodstock project to greatly simplify JSF component authoring. I think it’s a very interesting and helpful technique, which, by the way, resembles what JSF 2 will likely offer when we finally ship it later this year.
Oh, yeah. Happy New Year’s!
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