{#asciidoc} = The Maven Release Plugin Is Pretty Slick Jason Lee 2009-04-01

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:

{#asciidoc} = Webinar: From Ajax Push to JSF 2.0: ICEfaces on GlassFish Jason Lee 2009-03-12

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.

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{#asciidoc} = Announcing FacesTester

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.

{#asciidoc} = Opinions Wanted: v3 GUI Prototype Jason Lee 2009-02-25

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! :)

{#asciidoc} = What's Happening In the World of Mojarra Scales? Jason Lee 2009-02-23

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.