OcpSoft PrettyTime is an open-source time-formatting library for creating human-readable timestamps like, “in 3 minutes,” or “moments ago.” — intuitive, easy, extendable. Visit the home page to download and learn more about using PrettyTime. New features in this release: Thread Safety, Java 1.5 compatibility, extra languages.

Three steps to add Embedded GlassFish to any existing project POM. The Embedded Glassfish project is hosted on java.net, and as it is described, is very simple: “This project develops APIs and tools around “embedded GlassFish v3″. Embedded GFv3 is a delivery vehicle of GFv3 so that applications and tools can use GFv3 just as a library, inside their JVM, instead of having GFv3 as the overload of the entire JVM process. (And no, embedded GFv3 is not meant to be run on JavaME.)”

First, before reading this – you’re going to be upset with me. You’re going to disagree. I know — it’s OK. You may not even believe me, but you might keep reading because anger inspires action.

If you’ve ever programmed in PHP, Ruby, Perl, Groovy, and probably others, then you know how nice it is to have a central, official space for reference documentation and inline community feedback. This is something that has sorely been missing from the JEE community, and something that has caused many disparate websites to attempt putting forward a weak effort in providing useful documentation — you leave the community part aside to think that this is a good thing for any open-source technology.

Take a break from your software to read this: Today (February 12, 2010) marks the 20th anniversary of a remarkably simple, unimportant, yet incredibly special and sentimental event. A perspective that few consider in their daily lives.

PrettyFaces

Sometimes things are worth writing about.

While working on the PrettyFaces: bookmarking, and SEO extensions for JSF / JSF2, I came across a need to modify the current request parameters in order to “trick” the system into thinking that additional query parameters had been supplied.

Naively, I tried:

But that doesn’t work, because you aren’t allowed to modify request parameter values once the request has begun processing:

As a vocal blogger, I feel responsible for promoting and sharing the good work of others, whether that be technology, creative work, or in this case: a book. I will take no exception to that philosophy when it comes to the JavaServer Faces framework. For a quick read, try the summary. If you are intrigued, read on! I hope you find this review valuable.

OcpSoft is considering a new development environment for our projects, and we need your help. Our current development environment is annoying, painful at times. So the question is: “What development environment would you recommend?”

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?”