In Relation To

Two of my favorite blogs are The Volokh Conspiracy, written by a bunch of libertarianish legal academics, and Language Log, about linguistics. I really enjoy seeing how folks from very different disciplines reason and express themselves in writing (lawyers in particular are especially clear thinkers). This morning I started wondering if I'm missing out on other equally great groupblogs.

When this blog is writing, JSF 2.0 specification reached the Public Review status. Everybody can visit the JSR-314 EG page and download his own copy of it. Comparing to JSF 1.2 when the implementation appeared about one year after the specification is done, Sun is developing the reference implementation, also known as Project Mojarra, at the time with writing the specification. Thus, you can try new features of JSF 2.0 right away downloading the Mojarra 2.0.0 PR release from the project home page: https://javaserverfaces.dev.java.net/ .

JSF 2.0 has some cool innovation features. One of them is PDL (Page Declaration Language). PDL inherits its core functionality from two well known JSF project - Facelets and JSFTemplates. Among all other features, it allows to create new JSF components in declarative manner, without creating a bunch of java classes like it was in the previous JSF versions. In this blog we will test-drive this feature and show the top features of PDL.

Binary Mojarra distribution already contains ezcomp00 and ezcomp01 applications that show the basic of the PDL. We are not going to repeat them, but will create something different. RichFaces has a rich:panel, pretty simple, but useful JSF component. It represents the rectangle with a body and an optional header defined by a facet. The look-n-feel of the rich:panel is defined with some set of css rules. Some of those rules refer to the parameters taken from the skin parameters. I.e. css has static and dynamically generated rules. If header presents, it is filled with background gradient generated by java class that also uses the skin parameters as base colors for generated gradient. The working example of the rich-panel you can see at the main richfaces demo at: http://livedemo.exadel.com/richfaces-demo/richfaces/panel.jsf

I had fun reading this. The author degenerates into relativism toward the end, but the core point of the article is spot on: the phrase best practice is one that is used by bullies and the intellectually incurious to avoid having to evaluate novel solutions upon their own merits. It's an appeal to authority that sidesteps the nasty requirement of having to actually state any actual authority.

Emanuel Muckenhuber send me this video today showing how JBoss Tools trunk looks like when animated with code swarm.

Although this is old news, just to make a simple blog announcement,
DZone posted my MC part II. article, the title is Advanced Dependency Injection and IoC.

As you may know, I've been working very closely with the other stake holders in JSF (e.g. Sun, Oracle, Apache) on JSF 2. I just wanted to pull together a few recents threads to give you an update.

InfoQ is running an interview we did about Web Beans.

The public draft of Bean Validation is finally out and available here on the JCP website. We have made a lot of improvements and took a lot of feedback from you since the last draft: