Seam 2.0 beta

July 1, 2007 at 9:08 pm · Filed under Java / Java EE, Web technology

Gavin King and crew has relased Seam 2.0 beta with many new features and bug fixes.

The Seam 2.0 codebase is more robust, better organized, better documented and is designed to take Seam beyond the world of JSF

Read Gavin's blog post here

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JavaServer Faces 2.0 JSR draft

April 5, 2007 at 9:29 am · Filed under Java / Java EE, Web technology

The Sun JSF team with Ed Burns in front has decided to go public with a pre-JCP-filing of the JSR for JavaServer Faces 2.0. You can read the announcement in this post from Ed Burns. The draft for the JCP-filing is located here.

This is cool stuff! It brings a lot of new features to JSF along with optimizations to the current release (JSF 1.2). The new specification is timed for release with Java EE 6 so we will have to wait until fall 2008 before the spec (hopefully) is done and then some years for vendors to fully implement the spec.

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Cool ajax personalized homepage

March 13, 2007 at 10:45 pm · Filed under Web technology

For a long time now I have been using Google personalized homepage to display rss feeds from various sources like theserverside.com and different interesting blogs. This has been very handy to get a quick overview of stuff happening around me (instead of using a standard rss reader).

For some time I have been aware of www.netvibes.com which is a very cool Ajax/Web 2.0/really responsive UI/good looking/buzz-word compliant personalized homepage. You can do everything like that of Google and a lot more. It integrates with many popular sites like Flickr, del.icio.us, Technorati, MySpace, Gmail, Calendar, Digg, YouTube, Weather services, search engines etc. You can of course add feeds of your own, create tabs, arrange boxes with drag 'n' drop, use themes and languages, add local content, and generally design the page yourself. These guys really know how to use Ajax to create a cool rich internet application (RIA). 

Check it out!

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JAOO: Den helstøbte udvikler

October 3, 2006 at 3:36 pm · Filed under .NET, Java / Java EE, EA and SOA, Software development, Web technology

Computerworld.dk skrev idag i denne artikel at den moderne udvikler skal kunne håndtere en bred vifte af webteknologier, programmeringssprog, arkitekturer og udviklingsmetoder. Det er budskabet på konferencen JAOO, der finder sted i Århus.

Den helstøbte udvikler kender til nye webteknologier som Ajax, programmeringssprog som Java, C#, og Ruby, arkitekturer som SOA (serviceorienteret arkitektur), forskellige modelleringsværktøjer og agile udviklingsmetoder. I hvert fald hvis man skal tage JAOO-konferencens program som udtryk for, hvad den helstøbte udvikler er. 

Så kan jeg jo bare glæde mig over at jeg er godt på vej til at blive en helstøbt udvikler, da det netop er ovenstående egenskaber jeg fokuserer på at lære og til dels allerede mestrer :-)

JAOO afvikles som sagt i Århus i denne uge, og der er en masse kloge hoveder som f.eks. Martin Fowler, Gregor Hohpe, Bertrand Meyer, Ed Burns, Nikhil Kothari osv. som det kunne have været fedt at høre.

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Prototype is the most popular Ajax framework

September 28, 2006 at 8:19 am · Filed under Web technology

I've just seen in this article on InfoQ.com that Prototype is the most popular Ajax framework across the Java, .NET, and Rails communities. According to recently released survey results from Ajaxian.com, prototype is the most popular Ajax framework in use, by a large margin (45%), followed by Scriptaculous (which is built on Prototype), Dojo came 3rd (19%).  5th and 6th were DWR (12%) and moo.fx (11%).

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GWT-JSF Integration Library

August 31, 2006 at 6:35 pm · Filed under Java / Java EE, Web technology

With the G4jsf project that is a subproject of Ajax4jsf you can now integrate the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) with JavaServer Faces (JSF). 

The purpose of G4jsf:

The subproject's purpose is to maintain an integration library for the Google WebToolkit (GWT) and JavaServer Faces (JSF) that wraps Google widgets into JSF components to fully leverage both technologies.

In this article from TheServerSide.com Sergey Smirnov walks you through G4jsf and develops a small example application.

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AJAX and JavaServer Faces

August 1, 2006 at 5:01 pm · Filed under Java / Java EE, Web technology

In the past few weeks I have looked at the various posibilities for using Ajax with JavaServer Faces (JSF). You can of course code all the javascript/dhtml/css yourself or you can use a toolkit like Dojo, Script.aculo.us or something like that. But you can also use a set of JSF components / RenderKit. With this approach you don't need to worry about writing and debugging some ugly javascript that doesn't behave the same way in the different browsers. You naturally also get all the advantages of the JSF framework, which I won't elaborate on on this post.

Regarding Ajax for JSF several initiatives are going on both open-source and commercially. This is not a full list, but in the following I will shortly introduce some of them.

Open-source
The Sun Blueprints team is working on some AJAX components which I think is included in Sun Studio Creator 2 (I installed it the other day, but damn it was heavy to use). Ed Burns, the co-spec lead for JavaServer Faces, and Jacob Hookom, member of the JavaServer Faces expert group, put forward their take on JSF and AJAX in the JavaServer™ Faces Technology Extensions project. There is also the jMaki project which is a little broader than just JSF components I think. Finally there is Exadel's ajax4jsf project. According to Ed Burns ajax4fsj and the JavaServer™ Faces Technology Extensions project has a similar approach.

Commercial
Recently ICEsoft released ICEfaces Enterprise Edition 1.0, an implementation of JSF that relies heavily on AJAX functionality. ICEfaces looks pretty cool I think. You can take a look at their Component Suite Showcase. Actually ICEfaces also comes in a Community Edition which is a fully featured product free for development and deployment. But it miss some enterprise details such as clustered deployment support. View the complete feature comparison between the Community Edition and the Enterprise Edition here.

As mentioned earlier Exadel has their open-source ajax4jsf project. They also has the commercial Exadel Studio Pro IDE and the Exadel Visual Component Platform (VCF), which is a rich component library for JSF with AJAX capabilities. You can view a demo here. I haven't looked into VCF, but I have tried Exadel Studio which is their free version of the IDE. It works good but that's probably because it's Eclipse-based :-) For a comparison between the Pro and Free version see this feature comparison.

Very recently Infragistics announced the release of NetAdvantage for JSF 2006, Volume I. This is a commercial set of AJAX-enabled JSF components for building user interfaces in J2EE. It includes design-time support for Sun Studio Creator and Eclipse (including Exadel Studio). Infragistics also has a cool showcase of their components. According to a comment on theserverside.com from Kito D. Mann, author of JSF in Action, NetAdvantage for JSF should be of good quality.

Which one to use
I can't say. They all look cool because they make it possible to do AJAX relatively simple if you know JSF. But you should probably look into their architecture and clarify if they fit your needs. I have the luxury of just playing around with them because I'm only a student and don't do any serious customer projects. If I find the time maybe I will take a look at ajax4jsf with the free version of Exadel Studio. Or maybe the community edition of ICEfaces. Maybe I don't get the time at all! My wife is due to give birth to our first child tomorrow. Exciting :-)

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GUI Editor for Google Web Toolkit

July 21, 2006 at 11:31 am · Filed under Java / Java EE, Web technology

Wirelexsoft has announced an Eclipse-based visual GUI editor for Google Web Toolkit (GWT) called VistaFei. With VistaFei GWT UI’s can be built using drag and drop from a Palette controls and WYSIWYG editing area. You can watch a demo video and tutorial at Wirelexsoft’s site or read the original post at InfoQ.com.

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Ruby plug-in for Visual Studio

July 19, 2006 at 2:03 pm · Filed under .NET, Web technology

It seems like people really wants to take open-source technologies and frameworks and make plug-ins for Visual Studio. In this post I mentioned a MySQL plug-in for Visual Studio. Now there is a commercial plug-in called “Ruby in Steel” on its way. The plug-in developed by the Sapphire In Steel project will give enterprise users a familiar environment for working with Ruby files and Ruby on Rails projects.

It seems like a great thing to get an IDE for RoR. I got a little scared of the productivity of RoR when i saw a fellow student working with RoR on a Linux machine with tons of different command-line windows open. That didn’t look really interesting to me cause i’m used to the nice features of Visual Studio and Eclipse. Actually there is also an Eclipse-based IDE for Ruby on Rails called RadRails. The RadRails tools are also available as Eclipse plug-ins.

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