Say what you want about JSF, but the concept of renderers is a feature I really like, and is one area where JSF actually shines (No this is not intended as flame bait).

Quote from the site

The Mobile JSF (JavaServer Faces) Kit consists of the MobileFaces core library, a developer’s guide and sample applications to help Java EE developers to rapidly develop internet mobile applications.

Skimming through the doc it seems to contain quite allot of nice features, like detecting devices although it especially states that detecting screen size are not possible.

So is the time right to face your enterprise app to the mobile platform? This certainly could make things easier.

Facelets 1.1.12 was just uploaded to Java.net and includes many small bug fixes for JSF 1.1 (MyFaces 1.1.4) and JSF 1.2 (RI 1.2_03b5).

Download Here

This release is considered ‘draft’ until users call it stable for production use. More information is found over at Facelets’ web site.

If you have missed out on facelets for any reason, now is the time to check it out (but I can’t for the love of * find a decent release note on this particular release)

Edit: Matt kindly points me to the release note

Another certification…

Last week I completed (and cleared) the Certified JBoss Developer, the test was quite interesting and a good followup to the the JBoss for Advanced J2EE Developer course I attended a couple of weeks back. Quite interesting to write an open-book certification, where you get 24h to complete the test (taking it at home). I recommend the course to anyone looking for the nitty-gritty details about JBoss AS (although you can pick up the information by reading the JBoss AS Guide). Although certification really doesn’t tell you anything, it can be a good edge to get interesting gigs.

Joined a JSR expert group..

Since I joined the JCP almost 10months ago, I have been more of a lurker (I haven’t participated actively in any JSRs). The time of change is here, some months ago I requested to join the JSR299 (WebBeans) expert group, and yesterday I got the approvement email. The JSR is really interesting, for those unfamiliar with it it’s basically Seam in a standardized way (the JSR is lead by Gavin King).

Work, work, work..

It has been real busy week at work (both client wise and internally). My current project is nearing it’s end (implementation wise) and I have had more time to actually do some coding in the project (ie less meetings, management, mentoring). I’ve been concentrating on verifying the overall architecture against the requirements. Also quite a bit of refactoring, moving out some common JSF functionalites to reusable components, this have given me a good chance to really dive into the JSF spec. Hopefully I will make these components available in some form over the coming months, it’s not exactly rocket-science component but usefully small tidbits.

I have also been busy on weekends, late nights migrating the infrastructure from old hardware/software to new servers. To this stage we been quite successfully and we have deprecated some applications, and old hardware. And I have begun to extend, and introduce a SSO solution to our business critical applications (most of them homegrown, and on diffent platforms such as .NET, J2EE, and classic ASP). We settled on CAS which seems to be a proven solution, but we are not quite there yet. We need to plug this into a Microsoft Active Directory for the authentication store, any suggestions here are very much welcome.

JSF is quite cool, even though I haven’t had the time to play around with it as much as for e.g. Tapestry, but I believe for it to take momentum we need to see a nice ecosystem of components (commercial and open), that’s the whole point about a component based framework. Another point is that JSF seems to be designed around RAD development, I am not sure how good the tools are these days but it seems to be catching up. I believe if JSF should take a hard spot on the framework map we need the RAD tools (at least to catch the “corporate developer” coming from a background such as VB/.NET).
Hopefully I will have the opportunity to form a tighter opinion about JSF in the near future since my current project uses/starting to use JSF.