{#asciidoc} = Mojarra 1.2_15 Now In Maven Repo Jason Lee 2010-08-26

Way back in July, Ed Burns released and announced Mojarra 1.2_15, which is mostly a backport of performance fixes from the 2.0 branch. Given recent changes on the Mojarra team¹, there was some confusion and difficulty getting the jars published to the java.net Maven repository. I’m happy to report, though, that we’ve gotten those kinks worked out, and that this new release of the 1.2 branch of Mojarra is now available for your Mavenized pleasure. Note that this is the Maven 1 repository, and it’s not in central. Those are separate issues on which we’re still working.

¹ Many, many thanks to you, Ryan, for all of your hard work over the years, and best of luck in your new position. :)

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{#asciidoc} = Book Review: JSF 2.0 Cookbook

image::https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/productview/9522.jpg

Packt Publishing recently released a book titled JSF 2.0 Cookbook, by Anghel Leonard. When I first heard about this book, I was really anxious to get my hands on it. I really like the cookbook concept, so I was excited to see a work in that vein published for JSF. Packt recently sent me a copy to review, so, having read most of the book, here are my thoughts.

First off, I’ll be upfront: I have not read the whole book, but I don’t think that’s a problem. Cookbooks aren’t meant to be read cover to cover, necessarily. While you can certainly do that, these types of books are intended to be a reference. When you have an issue, you look in the table of contents to find the "recipe" that covers your issue, and jump to that page. That’s what I did with this book, mostly. I looked up the recipes for issues I most often have trouble with. I did, though, read almost all of the custom component chapter, as that’s area that holds a lot of interest for me. I’ll give that one special attention in a moment.

Each recipe, follows the same basic pattern. It starts with a basic summary of the problem, then goes in to "Getting ready," "How to do it…​," "How it works…​" and "See also." There are minor deviations along the way, but that’s the basic gist. In the Getting Ready section, the author details how the recipe was created (NetBeans 6.8, Mojarra 2.x, and GlassFish v3, showing the author has great tastes : ), so new users can get a sense of what might help work through the recipe. The How to do it section is pretty detailed, with LOTS of source code. Much of the markup is still using JSP, which is a shame since JSP is all but formally deprecated with JSF 2.0 (Facelets being the de facto standard), but you shouldn’t have any major issues applying what you see to a Facelets page. The How it works section that follows does a great job of explaining…​err…​ how it works, which I think is really important. How to do something is rarely enough. If you understand why to do something and how that something works, you’ll be better equipped in the future for similar, but slightly different issues. This section does a good job of that.

The only area of the book I want to comment on specifically is Chapter 5, Custom Components. Of all the areas in JSF, component authoring has always been a favorite of mine. I am far from being a leading expert, but I’m pretty comfortable with it and really enjoy it. Chapter 5, then, was one of the first things I turned to. The author does a great job of giving a variety of examples using validators, ajax, etc. A big glaring flaw for me, though, was the discussion of the JSF lifecycle, a very important topic for component authors. In the graphic on page 130, encoding is shown as happening in the Apply Request Values Phase, and decoding is shown as happening in the Render Response Phase. Unless I’m sorely mistaken, that’s exactly backwards. Despite that error, the chapter itself is extremely helpful. I would advise, though, that if you are looking to learn component development, to try JavaServer Faces 2.0: The Complete Reference by Ed Burns, and Chris Schalk, or Core JSF by David Geary and Cay Horstmann. That’s not to belittle this book in anyway. The Geary/Hortsmann and Burns/Schalk books are meant for different purposes. JSF 2.0 Cookbook has a slightly different purpose, which is complementary to the first two, and which it does well, I think.

Overall, I think this is a really good book. Though not perfect, it provides a lot of value to the JSF developer. From beginner to expert, I think there is enough in this book to help just about everyone out of a jam from time to time.

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{#asciidoc} = GlassFish Administration: The REST of the Story Part I Jason Lee 2010-08-20

Of the many great things about GlassFish, one that is often mentioned most (and is, in fact, what got me involved with GlassFish as an end user years ago) is the Administration Console. It’s an extremely powerful and capable interface, and is, if I may be so bold, orders of magnitudes better than its open source competition (it may even beat commercial competitors, but I have no experience with those). Another powerful tool in GlassFish administration is the asadmin CLI utility, which allows for quick and easy scripting of server provisioning, etc. Did you know, though, that GlassFish has a third administration interface? As of GlassFish v3, we offer a RESTful administration API, based on Jersey, to allow non-Java clients to configure the app server easily. For GlassFish 3.1, one of my main responsibilities, with the help, I should add of my coworkers Ludovic Champenois and Mitesh Meswani, has been to help improve upon the great start we had in in v3. In this entry, we’ll take a look at the current state of the interface and learn the basics of using.

{#asciidoc} = Book Review: JSF 1.2 Components

Some time ago, I was given a copy of JSF 1.2 Components by Ian Hlavats and asked if I’d write a review for it. It’s long overdue, but here are my thoughts on this book.

{#asciidoc} = Putting Facelets in a Jar Jason Lee 2010-05-04

In a recent forum post, a user asked how to store a Facelets file in a database. Although JSF doesn’t support this out of the box (though it would be a nice feature), it’s not too difficult to add. In this entry, I’ll show you how to serve Facelets from a JAR file, then give some thoughts that will help, I hope, implement a database-backed approach. I’ll be using JSF 2, so if you’re using Facelets 1.x with JSF 1.2, you’ll have to extend com.sun.facelets classes to make this work in that environment. With that out of the way, unto the breach!