“The problem is not the system, its the way someone can get in. To be honest, most tutorials, how-tos, and documentation sucks, because they ALL are written like the reader already knows the trick. No doc about [Technology] is written for newbies.”

I’d like to start by saying that using JSF by itself can sometimes feel trying to pull your own teeth out with a pair of tweezers, but there’s hope. JSF was designed to be a platform of extensions – a foundation for building web-frameworks, and that it’s done very well. JSF 2.0 addresses most of the concerns about usability (so there’s less tooth pulling,) and provides even more extensibility. That’s where Seam Faces comes in, that’s where PrettyFaces comes in. On many occasions you might find yourself needing to compare the values of multiple input fields on a given page submit: confirming a password; re-enter password; address lookups; and so on. Performing cross-field form validation is simple – just place Seam’s <s:validateForm> component in the form you wish to validate, then attach your custom Validator.

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.)”

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.

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:

It is amazing what can be done in exactly one year’s time.  January 17th will have been the 2nd anniversary since Lincoln Baxter and I started OcpSoft.  It’s been one seriously fun, and wild, ride with JavaServer Faces and the open-source community.  I want to take a moment to talk about my partner’s success story and what he has accomplished in just one short year.

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?”

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!