Introduction to Oracle’s ADF Faces Rich Client Framework

My introductionary article on Oracle’s ADF Faces Rich Client was published by DZone today. It is here. I hope you enjoy it.

Are you using Apache MyFaces Trinidad ?

Just took a look HERE and saw that more than 40 companies are already listed here. They are using Trinidad on their consulting gigs or for the projects or even products.

If you are using Apache MyFaces Trinidad, let us know and your company (and/or customer) to this list.

Patterns for rich web UIs – table with large data set

In “old” web application it was pretty common that there has to be a paginator to navigate through the large data set. Instead of presenting tons of rows (bad UI!) a NEXT/PREV link was next to the table for getting more data. Almost every table “component” has that (e.g. displaytag, tons of 3rd party JSF libraries, Rails,…) these days.

With “Ajax” and “WEB 2.0″ this pattern is not dead (e.g. see twitter, google, …), but a different pattern on handling larger data sets is getting more and more attention. The data is loaded when the user is scrolling down to the “end” of the table. As soon as the *visible* data is almost presented an eventhandler (on the scroller) is using Ajax to fetch new data, to be displayed once loaded.

Two examples that are following these patterns are ADF Faces Rich Client (a cool JSF library) and DZone.

Sure, both patterns are valid in different usecases and the “new” option is pretty cool enhancement to rich web UIs.

Apache MyFaces – a pretty active community

When I had to write the first quarterly report of the Apache MyFaces community (I am now the new chair, after Manfred Geiler decided to “retire”) I noticed that this community was able to have 11 releases, on all the different subprojects, over the last three month. Pretty cool, isn’t it ?

Here is the list of releases:

• MyFaces Core 1.2.5
• MyFaces Tomahawk 1.1.8
• MyFaces Tobago 1.0.19
• MyFaces Tobago 1.0.20
• MyFaces Trinidad 1.0.10
• MyFaces Trinidad 1.2.10
• MyFaces Orchestra 1.3
• MyFaces Extensions Validator 1.1.1
• MyFaces Extensions Validator 1.2.1
• MyFaces Portal Bridge 1.0.0-alpha-3
• MyFaces Portal Bridge 1.0.0-beta

Not only the community managed to release new bits, the community also continued the way to a JSF 2.0 implementation (the implementation project already started in September/October 2009). Also a discussion on a “global” skinning module (eventually useful in JSF 2.0 land?) was discussed.

I am pretty happy that this community is really doing well, after all the years

Thanks to every single contribution to the overall community.

New Google Chrome browser…

Read somewhere, that there is a new Google Chrome browser out… Wonder if that fixes some of the issues (-> work arounds) I had to do… At least the new version is suppused to have a more recent webkit “kernel”.

All these “cool” browser updates… so 1995……

hacks for http streaming

When working on Comet solutions, the sooner or later you have to do some browser hacks… When doing http streaming for the “push”, it is common to use an iframe as the source of the streaming conent. On the server you render the “update data”, when ever it is present. The browser is basically doing an incrementally rendering.

This works so far in most of the browsers, like Firefox2, IE7 or the latest greatest (-> nightly) WebKit. But not on Safari 3.2.1 or Google Chrome. To make them happy, I had to make the response a bit longer, by adding some bogus extra HTML…