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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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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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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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.

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

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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?
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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!
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If you are manipulating any FacesContext when doing any kind of Sevlet Forwards – such as from a filter – you MUST release() any FacesContext you’ve created. The consequences of forgetting this are potentially dire. Read the rest of this entry »

So you’ve got Spring Security up and running. Great! Now you’ve got a login page, and you just added a form on the global page menu to allow users to Login from any public page. There’s just one problem. When they log-in from a public page, they’re redirected to the default-login-url! Your users will have to re-navigate to the page they were already viewing when they logged in, or maybe they’ll just use the much dreaded “Back” button. That’s not a good interaction, but we have a solution. Read the rest of this entry »