In Relation To

Something that's always slightly bemused me is that software development methodology is something you never seem to hear discussed in organizations whose business is technology. Sure, product companies are certainly very interested in practices and tools to support good practices. (For example, product companies certainly care about testing practices.) But technical practices are kinda orthogonal to methodology debates. And I never hear about a company like Red Hat paying any attention at all to the latest fashions sweeping through the world of agile consultants and project managers. In fact, I'd be very interested to hear of a single example of a truly great software product that was developed (at least initially) according to a methodology.

Here's another usecase for the injection point metadata API that we're considering adding to Web Beans. I've always thought it would be nice to be able to inject entity instances by role, instead of passing references around the system. (In Seam, you can use home objects to achieve this.)

In the comments thread for this post, Bill got me thinking again about a problem that's been bugging me for a while.

It's fun to see what people are using Seam for:

IntelliJ IDEA 8 has Seam support. Cool!

If there's one thing that we really want to get right as Web Beans goes from Public Draft to Proposed Final draft, it's integration with the Java EE platform. Up to this point, most of the work we've been doing as an EG was focused on nailing down the programming model, the semantics of the Web Beans services, and the behavior of the Web Bean manager. We've been writing the spec to assume that Web Beans implementations should be pluggable between different Java EE containers, because this is a direction that a lot of folks in the Java EE community believe that the EE platform should move in, and because we would like Web Beans to help show the way for other specifications such as EJB, JTA and perhaps even Servlets (note that JPA and JSF already support this).

The Web Beans (JSR-299) specification is now available for public review.

For everyone who's been waiting for news of Web Beans ... and for everyone who thought it would never happen ... the public draft is ready, and should be available later this week or early next. I've just started work on an extended article explaining Web Beans from the point of view of the developer, and hope to have that out in a couple of weeks. And Pete Muir, Shane Bryzak and David Allen have made a good start on the RI. Stay tuned...

RichFaces 3.2.0.GA is out!

Congratulations to the JBoss Tools team at JBoss and Exadel for getting 2.0.1 out the door!