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:

    request.getParameterMap().put("name", new String[]{"value1", "value2"});

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

    java.lang.IllegalStateException: Cannot find message associated with key parameterMap.locked
	at org.apache.catalina.util.ParameterMap.put(ParameterMap.java:213)

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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.

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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.
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Often unknown, or heralded as confusing, regular expressions have defined the standard for powerful text manipulation and search. Without them, many of the applications we know today would not function. This two-part series explores the basics of regular expressions in Java, and provides tutorial examples in the hopes of spreading love for our pattern-matching friends. (Read part two.)
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Often unknown, or heralded as confusing, regular expressions have defined the standard for powerful text manipulation and search. Without them, many of the applications we know today would not function. This two-part series explores the basics of regular expressions in Java, and provides tutorial examples in the hopes of spreading love for our pattern-matching friends. (Read part one.)
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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?”

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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?”
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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!

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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!

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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):
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