David Geary's Presentation and sample code from last week's DJUG Meeting can now be found online. From Tom McQueeney, DJUG's new president (congrats Tom!):
For those that missed last week's meeting, David introduced us to the
new JavaServer Faces specification, now in its 4th "early access"
release on the Sun web site. David considers JSF to be a "Struts killer"
once the standard takes hold within the development community and tool
vendors. The JSF 1.0 final spec is expected to be released early next year.
Early next year == March from what I've heard...
... on the drive home.
I discovered today that there is are new releases of the JSP Standard Tag Library over at Jakarta's Taglibs project. JSTL 1.0 has a Standard 1.0.4 release from September 25th, and there's also an early access 1.1 release (for Servlet 2.4/JSP 2.0). If you're doing JSP development and you're not using JSTL, you'd better start - these tags are huge timesavers and are fairly easy to learn (especially if you know JavaScript).
I also discovered a nice feature in Dreamweaver 2004 - Tag Library code completion. I believe Dreamweaver MX (v6.0) had this as well, but I never use DW on a PC (it's too slow). Now that I'm giving a go at using OS X all the time, I need to use DW so I can get an explorer-like window (BBEdit doesn't seem to have this). It's pretty slick - you just import the .tld or .jar and whalla - you've got tag library code completion. The one downside is that it does not support importing multiple libraries from one JAR file (i.e. Struts or JSTL), so you do have to import the .tld files (selecting all .tld files in a directory works). It might actually be worth the $400 if I keep developing on a Mac. I don't know about IDEA - I started using Eclipse today after using IDEA for the past week and it felt like I was home again.
Lastly, iBatis has a new release. I upgraded from 1.2.7b to 1.2.8 in my current project and all our tests ran without a hitch. Gotta love unit tests.
There's nothing like receiving 512 MB of new RAM and then not being able to install it because you can't find a screwdriver small enough to unscrew the bottom of your PowerBook! My advice - buy the screwdriver before you buy the RAM.
