2010

February

• New Components in Mojarra Scales: Part IV – sc:combo

  Yesterday brought us Part III in our look at some new components in Mojarra Scales. Today, Part IV brings us sc:combo, combination, if you can imagine that, of a h:selectOneMenu and h:inputText.

• New Components in Mojarra Scales: Part III – sc:imageZoomer and sc:lightbox

  In Part II of this series, I introduced the new auto complete component in Mojarra Scales. In this installment, we’ll take a look at two new closely related components, sc:imageZoomer and sc:lightbox.

2009

December

• New Components in Mojarra Scales: Part II – sc:autoComplete

  In Part I, I introduced the new YUI-backed Scales dataTable component. In this installment in the series, we"ll take a look at another new component available in Scales 2.0, sc:autoComplete.

• New Components in Mojarra Scales: Part I - sc:dataTable

  The migration of Mojarra Scales to JSF 2, adding new components has become much easier due to JSF 2’s new composite component feature. In the past couple of weeks, this new capability has paid off in spades as Mojarra Scales has gotten (so far) three new components in rapid succession. In this, the first part of a multi-part series, we’ll take a look at the most complex of the new components, sc:dataTable.

November

• The Mojarra Scales Demo Has Moved

  With the recent migration of Mojarra Scales to JSF 2, the old location of the Mojarra Scales demo was no longer adequate (upgrading that server posed some issues). For that reason, I have moved the demo to a new home. This server should be more up-to-date (both in terms of the application as well as the application server — which is GlassFish v3, of course — that runs it). When accessing the application, please keep in mind that it’s on an old server that’s running on an AT&T U-verse line, and the download times will reflect that. :)

  I’d also like to not that this showcases a couple of new components at the moment. I’ve begun an implementation of the YUI data table widget. At the time of this posting, basic table functions work, including client-side sorting. More complex functionality, such as Ajax updates, are in the offing.

  Another new component, which the demo uses extensively, is the excellent SyntaxHighligher script from Alex Gorbatchev. The demo uses this new component to show the page source for each demo, finally allowing you to see a given component in action, as well seeing the page markup that makes those components. The demo is still in flux, so some things aren’t quite "perfect" yet. For example, Safari really hates the markup the demo produces, which is a bug in the demo application itself. Hopefully, that will soon be fixed. For now, Safari users will need to use another browser.

  As I’ve noted, Scales has been migrated to JSF 2. While most components are working as expected, there are likely some minor issues to work out. If you run into any of these issues, or if you’d like to see extra functionality in any of the components, please feel free to file an issue on the Scales issue tracker on the Kenai project site.

August

• Mojarra Scales 1.3.2 Has Been Released

  Late last night, I published Mojarra Scales 1.3.2. This is mostly a bug and performance fix, but here are some highlights from the release:

  • <sc:links /> (and related supporting classes and components) was modified to allow files only from /scales to fix a pretty glaring security hole in some scenarios

  • When multiple, local requests for a given resource type (CSS or JS) are queued, they are now rendered to the page in such a way that they will be returned in a single request. That is to say, Mojarra Scales will now concatenate these files into one response, so as to reduce the number of network operations.

  • Scales now correctly handles cached files. When a CSS or JS resource is sent, Scales now employs etags to help the client cache the file properly. On subsequent requests, if the client sends the last modified header, Scales properly handles the date, returning 304 when appropriate

  • <tab/> now supports the style and styleClass attributes.

  • The multi-file upload component has been moved out of the main jar into its own artifact so that those not using the component will have a smaller deployment. This component can be found under the upload artifactId in the maven repository.

  The jar files, including the demo app, can be downloaded from kenai.com or via maven (the demo is not in maven).

  With the architectural changes in 1.3 out of the way, the next version of Scales should include more components, as well as enhancements to existing components. At some point, the project will be branched for a migration to JSF 2. With the spec being final and Mojarra 2 scheduled to ship in a couple of weeks, it seems the time is right for the move. Time will tell, of course, how soon that move is made.

  If you have any issues, please comment in the forum.

April

• Mojarra Scales 1.3.1 Has Been Released

  Early this morning, I published Mojarra Scales 1.3.1. I’ve been remiss in making good updates where when I make release, so, rather than creating a new post for each release long after the fact, I’ll try to being everyone up to the current state in just one.

• My JSFCentral Interview Has Been Published

  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. :)

• FacesTester 0.1 Released

  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.

February

• What's Happening In the World of Mojarra Scales?

  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.

January

• Mojarra Scales Gets a Z-Order Update

  As I noted in a recent entry, we are considering moving to a desktop-like interface for the GlassFish Administration Console, where the content is in separate "windows" (decorated DIVs, basically) which can be moved, closed, minimized, etc. As I’ve started working on a concrete implementation of some of those ideas, I quickly realized that we were going to have issues with multiple, overlapping windows. Once you have multiple windows open, the user has to be able to bring the desired window to the front, but YUI, which will likely be the library used, doesn’t support that natively. Fortunately, that’s easy to fix. First, an example of the problem:

2008

June

• Mojarra Scales 1.0 RC2 is out

  I have just uploaded RC2 for Mojarra Scales 1.0, a JSF component set born of the Mojarra Sandbox. This release features a number of bug fixes and a handful of new enhancements. When updating, make sure you grab the latest JSFTemplating snapshot from either its download page or Maven, as there are some bug fixes and features there that Scales needs. You can download the last jar here.

May

• Mojarra Scales 1.0 Release Candidate 1

  Today, I released the first release candidate for Mojarra Scales, the JSF component library I helped create. Rather than repeat myself, I’ll just paste the email announcement here:

March

• Reintroducing the JSFTemplating FileStreamer

  In a blog entry last year, Ken Paulsen gave a short introduction to the FileStreamer utility in JSFTemplating. Since Scales is now using JSFTemplating to make the component authoring process easier, I have been able to use this facility, allowing me to deprecate some custom code. In the process of making the migration, I’ve made changes to JSFTemplating that will be of benefit to all. In this entry, I’d like to highlight those changes, and show you how you, too, can use this great facility.

January

• Dependency Management with Ant and Ivy

  One of my long-standing complaints with Ant is that project dependency management is non-existent in the core Ant distribution. Many will quickly point to the Maven Ant tasks, but I’ve never been really fond of them for one reason or another. The other advice I often get is to use Ivy, but even after several attempts, I had never gotten Ivy to work. With the recent release of 2.0 beta 1, though, I thought I’d try again, and I’m glad I did. Not only have I gotten it to work for me, but I was also able to successfully configure custom resolvers. Below is what I had to do to migrate the Mojarra Scales dependency management to Ivy.

• JSFTemplating and Woodstock: Component Authoring Made Easy

  In my last post, I alluded to some refactoring done inside the Sandbox / Scales library to simplify the components' code. If you are interested in learning more about what was done, and how you can apply the same techniques to your own JSF components, please see this article, written by Ken Paulsen and myself, with editing help from Rick Palkovic, which shows how one can use JSFTemplating and some (currently "private") annotations from the Woodstock project to greatly simplify JSF component authoring. I think it’s a very interesting and helpful technique, which, by the way, resembles what JSF 2 will likely offer when we finally ship it later this year.

  Oh, yeah. Happy New Year’s! :)

• Announcing Mojarra Scales

  Some of you may be wondering what the status is on the RI Sandbox. With the announcement of Project Mojarra, we can finally take the wraps off of Mojarra Scales, the promotion of the RI/Mojarra Sandbox to its own project. There are a few differences between the Sandbox of Scales to note, such as package names, namespace, etc. There has also been a fair amount of refactoring inside the library to simplify the components somewhat (more on that later). To migrate from the RI Sandbox to Mojarra Scales, you will need to do the following: