As the specification writing part of JSF 2 comes to a close, we’re getting a more complete implementation done on the reference implementation, Mojarra. One of the primary developers on Mojarra is Jim Driscoll (the other being Ryan Lubke, who has done such an excellent job on the 1.2 series). Jim, apparently, has been in a writing mood and has posted a number of very good (and small) posts on some of the features coming in JSF 2 (similar to Ryan’s series from earlier this year).

I was about to start planning a smallish app, to be based on JSF 2, so I was perusing Jim’s entries, and it occurred to me that a list of the links would be helpful for those following JSF 2 but not Jim’s feed, so here it is. I hope it helps. :)

I know Jim has more planned, so subscribe to his feed. It should be well worth your time.

With the release of JavaFX 1.0 scheduled for this Thursday, December 4, the JavaFX team set up a technical pre-launch call and invited JUG leaders, Java Champions, NetBeans Dream Team members and others to call in and get a sneak peak at what was coming (audio and slides available here). Josh Marinacci was the engineer on hand to give us the preview. A couple of things stood out to me that has me pretty excited.

The current state of the JSF 2 spec has entered the Public Review phase. If you have any interest in JSF, now is a good time to review what we’ve done in the spec thus far and send feedback, which we will discuss and digest for the Proposed Final Draft due out next. You can find the Public Review here, and you can send your comments here.

The NetBeans team recently released version 6.5 of the NetBeans IDE, which I really, really like. They also released an Early Access peek at the Python support coming for NetBeans. Unfortunately, it’s not straightforward to get Python and Java EE support in the same installation. The Python EA release is a complete NetBeans installation, i.e., you can’t just add the modules to an existing NetBeans installation.

Fortunately, there is a pretty easy solution to this: if you already have an existing 6.5 installation, you can simply run the Python EA installer, which will detect the existing 6.5 install and update it to add Python support. Unfortunately, the installer has a bug on OS X, which breaks this functionality. The end result is that your existing installation is replaced, which is likely not what you want. The good news is that there is a workaround, albeit ugly and manual, to get us Mac users running while they fix the installer issue. Here are the steps I followed to add Python support to NetBeans 6.5 on the Mac (big thanks to the NetBeans Users list for the tips that led to this solution):

You should now be able to create a new Python project. The installer bug should be fixed in the next release (my guess is that it’s already fixed in the NB hg repo), but these "easy" steps should get you going in the interim.

For some time now, Sun has made use of Ustream.TV to broadcast webinars covering various topics of interest to GlassFish users.  That effort continues on November 20th at 11am PST as Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart hosts Dan Allen, author of Seam in Action to discuss Seam, WebBeans, and GlassFish.  Some of WebBeans' companion specs (EJB 3.1 and JSF 2) will also be covered by spec leads Ken Saks and Roger Kitain, respectively.  For more information, see this page on Sun’s wiki. To catch previous broadcasts on The Aquarium’s Ustream.TV channel, you can go directly there.

In my last article, I talked about writing plugins for the GlassFish v3 Prelude Administration Console, which showed the various integration types supported out-of-the box by the console, but what if a plugin developer would like to allow <i>other</i> plugins to extend it just like the console itself does. In this short article, we’ll show how to do exactly that.

I may have made a mistake, but I’ve joined 2007 and hopped on twitter.  You can follow me here, or view my latest updates in the sidebar.

One more note (for now :) on GlassFish v3 Prelude.  Sun is holding an online event called GlassFish Day, which is a day of short presentations (about 10 minutes each).  There will be several presentations throughout the day.  To see the schedule and decide which ones are of interest to you, please see this entry from The Aquarium.

Today, the GlassFish community is launching GlassFish v3 Prelude (Release Notes and Quick Start Guide). If you are not familiar with what Prelude is, here is a short write up giving the high level details. In this article, I’d like to focus on the third bullet there, "CLI and administration console extensibility." Specifically, we’ll look at what it takes to create a plugin that will extend GlassFish v3’s Administration Console.

I’ve been meaning to say something about this for while, now, but I have been a bit busy, and was finally beaten to the punch by Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine over at The Aquarium. Before I go any further, go read Alexis' article, paying particular attention to the "real #1 winner" link. Go ahead. I’ll wait…​