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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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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I don’t know why I waited so long. Maybe I just thought the G1 was ugly, maybe it’s my futile fight against the mob of conformity. I bought the Droid. Now my already over-active sense of entrepreneurship, restless production has new food. Goodbye night-time reading for a little while.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

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