It was about one year prior to this article that I wrote “JSF2 is in good hands”, in which I spoke about the upcoming release of JavaServer™ Faces 2, and how the community had changed immensely in the few years I’d been using the tool. There were changes I wanted to make, and started making them by publishing an open source extension called PrettyFaces. PrettyFaces lets you map Pretty URLs to any resource within a JSF-based web-application (eg: /example -> /faces/examples/page.xhtml). While this is stuff that other web-frameworks have been doing for years, (WordPress, Rails/Grails, etc) it’s stuff that has traditionally been hard using JavaServer Faces – until around November 2008, when the first release was published. Now, I’m relatively new to this arena – I entered the open source community for the first time about four years ago, working on PHP and Perl modules. I’ve been using it, and appreciating it, for almost my entire life in the industry, but never giving back. I suppose one question that many people ask is, “Will working on open source software get me anywhere in my career?”

PrettyFaces went on the road and presented at JSFSummit 2009 (Dec 1st – 5th, Orlando, FL,) and for those of you who missed it, here are the slides. The presentation wasn’t recorded, but the slides alone are a good read. If you are interested in JavaServer Faces, Url Rewriting, or SEO and best practices, this presentation is for you!

So, GlassFish v3 is out the door, and I just got a nice little note from the dev-tracker on Java.net. This is only a fraction of the issues I’ve filed, but the rest are on the JSF-SPEC tracker, so they wouldn’t show up here. Still, nice touch!

As a member of the JSF 2 expert group, I’ve stated that my primary goal is to make JSF, and J2EE, more accessible to the community at large, to reach out and make sure that people’s voices are heard, and that what we are doing makes sense. I’ve only been part of the group for a little under a year, but I’ve met some pretty cool people, and you’d be surprised at how interested they all are to hear your story. Here’s an email from David Geary (a long-time EG member) to the Expert Group, that I think paints a very nice picture of people’s reaction to JSF and JSF2, author of Core Java Server Faces (Core JSF):

JSF2 is an amazing web-framework, and as part of our initiative to engage the community, Dan Allen, Andy Schwartz, Kito Mann, the rest of the Expert Group, and I have been putting together a “JSF Root Node” (as Ed Burns put it.) A website to be the first place people go to when they think of JSF.