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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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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So, this is going to be a short-relatively non-technical post, but having just run into the problem of exposing a subdirectory when WordPress is installed into the root directory of a typical DreamHost or GoDaddy style account, I found the need, so here’s the answer if anyone else needs it. Read the rest of this entry »

A new release of the PrettyFaces JSF extension for Bookmarkable/Pretty URLs is now availible for download. This release includes several new features.
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What makes Pretty URLs in JSF so hard, and so slow?

Speed up development, reduce bandwidth, enhance user experience. This article gives a brief overview of JSF navigation, some of the problems, and potentially how to solve them by enabling bookmarkable, pretty URLs. Put simply… in my view, out of the box, JSF is a web framework designed for web-applications, not designed for web-sites. PrettyFaces addresses most of these issues.

Target audience for this article:

1. The reader is familiar with JSF navigation.
2. The reader is attempting to create a JSF app with bookmarkable “pretty” URLs. E.g.: …/mysite/archives/2008/11/11/
3. The reader is familiar with HTTP request/response at a basic level.

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Tutorial – Step By Step

If you’ve learned to use JSF Facelets to create on-the-fly, simple components using XHTML, then you probably have a whole slew of custom components that need to be copied between various projects, and can be somewhat painful to keep up to date. You may have tried to move them into a jar file, but Facelets can’t find them there (without some help from us.)

*The author of this article has requested feedback on the usability of this article. Please post questions, improvements, and/or comments.

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A4J:Form is missing several specified ajax functions

(View this issue on the JBoss tracker here. Keep reading, there is a fix… download fix)

The issue:

When using the a4j:form component, the data=”#{managedBean.property}” the properties defined in the data element list are supposed to be available after the a4j event in the data JavaScript variable; however, with <a4j:form> the attribute is not correctly causing the JavaScript data variable to be populated.
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