Friday, October 13, 2006

NLJUG J-Fall 2006

Hi,

Another developer's blog. Lasy Wednesday I went to J-Fall, the annual fall Java conference of the NLJUG (Dutch Java User Group).

It was an interesting day. A lot of interesting sessions, but unfortunately I was only able to attend the sessions in the afternoon. To start of with some negative remarks: It was way too hot during the sessions, which made me sleepy. Having said that, the sessions I attended were of a more than decent quality.
The afternoon keynote was all about Spring AOP or rather about AOP and how you can use AOP to have a better representation of your design in your code. Interesting stuff. In fact this was an eye opener for me, sofar I thought AOP was pretty much for adding log statements to your code automatically. Great stuff, although I think AOP won't be used on most of the projects I'll be involved in. I wonder when it will really catch on.
Another interesting session was about Seam, JBoss's glueware to tie a JSF frontend to an EJB backend. Apart from the session's topic, I learned about a great feature of NetBeans, namely to create a complete CRUD frontend based on an Entity in your backend. Now that is some great stuff I should have had on a project a few years ago. Well at that time I created something similar based on XDoclet.
I also attended a session about applying JSF when the frontend should run on a mobile devices, PDAs in this case. Although it was sort of a recap of last years J-Spring keynote on ADF faces, it was still interesting to hear about a real world project utilizing one of the promising features of JSF. Fairly well presented session also.
The last session I went to see was about Facelets and JSF. A relavant comment was given by the audience that hardly ever web-designers are working with their tools on the results of developers. XHTML containing Facelets in this case, although it was presented as one of the strong points of facelets. I think the audience was right and I wouldn't want web-designers to mess with my JSPs or XHTML. Have them either design a prototype of the GUI and let me reproduce it, or have them design it using CSS, which in fact I prefer. Interesting topic and Facelets is definitely something I would like to use soon. Hope NetBeans' Visual Web Pack will provide WYSIWYG Facelet support soon.

That's it for today, have a great day and enjoy what you're doing.
Iwan

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

look at https://nbfaceletssupport.dev.java.net/

Visual Web Pack is just port of Creator 2 functionality to NB. (at least for now).

Unknown said...

Hi Lukas,

Well that is a great start, I hope development of Visual Web Pack and Creator will be in-synch from now on, or maybe Creator 3 will just be a plug-in for NetBeans.
Faceletsupport should be great but I can understand that it will take a while.

To be honest, I would rather like to see WAP/WML support or XHTML mobile profile support in NetBeans the likes of Creator and Mob Packs visual designer. That would be more helpful for me at the moment.

Iwan