A business partner of mine asked some basic questions about cloud computing. We had a small exchange that I felt worth sharing.

Q. Do you think it’s a good idea?

Absolutely. Press CTRL-ALT-DEL -> T, sometime. Click performance — I guarantee your CPU is running at about 1-5% utilization, somewhere around 97-99% of the time. From another perspective: that’s 95-99% waste of power, 97-99% of the time. And that’s just while you are physically using your computer… then you have to consider all of the wasted disk space. We have huge disk drives in our PCs (Most corporate employers only give us access to a small portion,) but that’s huge waste as well.

I’m no SEO expert, but in growing my own brand, I’ve come to learn some crucial concepts, perhaps not entirely technical, but more social and practical in nature. I can’t and won’t try to tell you that google ranks your pages better if you use certain words and put them in a specific order. But by using common sense, there are a few things we can all do to make our lives easier, and more visible.

PrettyFaces – SEO, Dynamic Parameters, Bookmarks, and Navigation for JSF / JSF2 version 2.0.3 offers a BIG new feature for URL validation, while 1.2.6 is a maintenance release, primarily adding the <p:link anchor=”…”> attribute – it does not include the new validation features.

Coinciding with the JSF2.0 release, OcpSoft will be updating PF1.2.x for maintenance only, however, community participation is still welcome on all versions of the project.

OcpSoft co-founder Lincoln Baxter will be speaking about PrettyFaces at JSFSummit, in Orlando FL – Dec 1st-4th, 2009.

The Presentation covers PrettyFaces basics, Search Engine Optimization, Rethinking Navigation, and Dynamic ViewIds:

PrettyTime 1.0.4 – Elapsed Timestamp Formatting for Java now supports additional Locales:

Supported locales:

• English – DEFAULT
• French – FR
• German – DE
• Chinese – ZH_CN
• Portugese – PT

If you have a resource bundle for another locale, or would like to create one, please email it to: admin@ocpsoft.com

Ever wonder why you can’t pass parameters to EL method-expressions? Well, now you can, and it’s easy to incorporate!

So, a little while ago I was attempting to use JSF’s Facelets <ui:repeat> tag, as a replacement for <h:dataTable>, but difficulty came when I needed to process actions on individual records of each row. <ui:repeat> allows iteration over a List of Array[] of items, but it does not provide a method of discovering the “selected” or “actioned” row; there’s no way to discover the row the user is interacting with. Or is there?

So, one of the best ways I know of to tell a user that they should be waiting for something to finish, is by setting the cursor to ‘wait’. It’s how desktop applications do it. It’s how the operating system does it… it’s how ajax should probably do it (if you want to solve the user wait interaction globally.) With JSF2, it’s easy to accomplish!

Are you using PrettyFaces on a project you can share about?

Looking for real-world experiences:

• How has PrettyFaces helped you or your team?
• What would you change if you could (you can)?
• If you would like to share, show us your work of art!

Email to: lincoln@ocpsoft.com Thank you! PS – In addition: If you’d like to be added to our new “People using PrettyFaces” page, also send a logo and a short description of your product or company!

PrettyFaces:

A new version of PrettyFaces for JSF1.1 (historical support) is now available for download. This version is feature-complete, but we are looking for feedback on compatibility and functionality that may be broken with various implementations, so please post comments!