In my experience, a pretty common bug with custom components is improper state saving. Since JSF components are, currently, stateful, it’s important that custom components integrate with the frameworks state saving mechanism correctly. Unfortunately, it can be an error-prone process, as it’s a manual effort. Now, however, custom component authors can use FacesTester to exercise this aspect of their components to help insure proper state handling. This article will show how to use this new feature of FacesTester.

In Christ Alone:

There in the ground His body lay Light of the world by darkness slain Then, bursting forth in glorious day Up from the grave He rose again And as He stands in victory Sin’s curse has lost it’s grip on me For I am His and He us mine Bought with the precious blood of Christ No guilt in life, no fear in death This is power of Christ in me From life’s first cry to final breath Jesus commands my destiny No pow’r of hell, no scheme of man Can ever pluck me from His hand 'Til He returns or calls me home Here in the pow’r of Christ I’ll stand

Maven catches a lot of flak from a lot of people. I’ve even been known to bemoan some its eccentricities from time to time. Over the past year and a half, though, I’ve done more and more with Maven, and I’m to the point now where that’s all I use. In fact, Maven and Ant have traded positions in my praise and scorn playbook. At any rate, in releasing FacesTester 0.1 yesterday, I was shown how to use the release plugin (which, by the way, has no parallel in Ant-space that I can see). This plugin helps in releasing a version of a project, updating all the version numbers as appropriate. Here’s a rough blow-by-blow of what happened:

Careful readers of my blog (thank you, dear wife! : ) will remember that I was interviewed at JSFOne by the conference co-founder and JSFCentral founder Kito Mann. That interview, complete with transcript, has been published on JSFCentral. I was a bit nervous about how it would turn out, but I think it turned out pretty well. I’m not a big fan of hearing my recorded voice, but there’s not much to be done about that. :)

About a month ago, I announced a new project, FacesTester, a JUnit-based testing tool for JSF that my good friend Rod Coffin and I have undertaken. Since then, Rod posted a very nice introduction to FacesTester usage. Today, we made our first official release, FacesTester 0.1. The version number should indicate that it’s still a work in progress, but it is already quite functional (I, for one, have been using it to build a test suite for Mojarra Scales, which has helped drive out features and resolve bugs very quickly). We wanted to push out a release to encourage people to download it, use it, and give us feedback.

So what does FacesTester currently support? Quite a bit. In this entry, we’ll take a quick look at what FacesTester offers, and what we have planned.

The GlassFish webinar series is, I think, a pretty valuable resource for regular readers of my blog, as it covers a lot of topics that I cover here. Today’s webinar, "From Ajax Push to JSF 2.0: ICEfaces on GlassFish," is particularly relevant, as it’s a JSF-related session. Here’s the abstract:

I had the opportunity to see Ted present Ajax Push (their term for Reverse Ajax or Comet, if you prefer those monikers) at last year’s JSFOne conference. The ICEfaces demos are very, very slick, and the level of simplicity they managed to achieve is absolutely amazing. If you have any interest in Ajax Push/Reverse Ajax/Comet, you should certainly attend this session. If you are currently using JSF, this is a really good example of the power of component-based frameworks like JSF.

One of the issues that has always troubled me with regard to writing JSF applications (or any web application, really) is how hard it is to test them. Some time ago, while discussing various Java web frameworks, I stumbled across a class called WicketTester, which is part of the Wicket project. Using this class, as best as I can tell, Wicket authors can easily test their applications very quickly. Having taken the advice of Dale Hanchey, and old college professor of mine, "Never be too proud to steal a good idea," FacesTester was born.

As I mentioned in a recent post, we’re investigating some changes to the GlassFish v3 Administration Console. We finally have something fairly concrete to show, and have set up a demo site for you to play with. Ken Pauslen sent an email regarding our demo to the GlassFish users' list, so instead of repeating all of that, I’ll simply quote his email for you below. Note the comment on performance toward the end. :)

Please send feedback to the link:mailto:webtier@glassfish.dev.java.net?subject=RE: Opinions Wanted: v3 GUI Prototype[webtier list] or the link:mailto:dev@glassfish.dev.java.net?subject=RE: Opinions Wanted: v3 GUI Prototype[dev list]. Many thanks! :)

I’ve been a bit silent of late on what’s happening with Mojarra Scales, so I thought I’d take a moment to bring everyone up to speed.

Since the announcement in the recent layoffs at Sun on how the NetBeans team was affected, there’s been much concern over the health of the project. I’m not on the NetBeans team (I’m just a big Finkel fan! ;) so I can’t say for certain what’s going on, but it seems to me that Sun is still committed to the platform. Evidence of that comes in the form of an email I got today about the upcoming 6.7 release. Here is the email: