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Wednesday July 14, 2004

DJUG: JavaServer Faces and Java Studio Creator

Tonight's DJUG meeting looks to be another dandy one. Bill Dudney is doing a talk on JavaServer Faces and Java Studio Creator.

This talk will take you through the basics of building a JavaServer Faces application. You will understand how to build a basic JSF application. We will build an application manually and then build it again with Java Studio Creator. If time permits, we'll compare the two implementations to identify when and how to use JSCreator effectively.

I'm mainly looking forward to it because I know Bill uses a PowerBook and Creator sucks on the Mac - even though Bill doesn't think so. Should be fun heckling him from the crowd. :-D Of course, I'm also looking forward to learning more about JSF since I'll be using it next week.

Posted in Java at Jul 14 2004, 09:39:30 AM MDT 4 Comments
Comments:

So how'd the meeting go? Did Bill do an adequate job of convincing Denver to use JSF from now on? On a side note, I was in a meeting a week or two ago, and two guys that develop apps with Struts both were telling a new project team forming (the team knows Java, but don't know webapps) that if they plan to start coding in 2 or 3 months that they should use JSF instead of Struts and don't bother trying to use both at the same time but go whole-hog on JSF. I found that statement to be quite interesting. I also noticed that MyEclipse is adding JSF support. This all makes me wonder how complete and how quick a migration to JSF will occur. Will Struts still be the big fish in the webapp framework pond in a year? Will visual tools for other frameworks like Spring and WebWork be common? Lots of questions -- these are interesting times!

Posted by gerryg on July 15, 2004 at 05:48 PM MDT #

I thought the meeting was OK but I'm not sure if the stuff I saw was "all that".
<bold>Basic Concepts: JESS</bold>
The JESS talk was interesting but the product costs a bundle and if you download the freebie it's "Nagware" so you'd have to reinstall the darn thing every month. JESS is a rules engine and the speaker showed us how the product learns and does these decision trees. You enter the 'rules' and 'facts' (templates filled with data) and it can learn as it runs and the users enters more facts. One of the problems was there is no easy way to persist that rule and fact set as it grows. He described that you could call Java APIs directly but I spoke with a friend who was at the presentation and he said the speaker said you don't have full access to the Swing Java API from JESS.

<bold>Main Speaker: Bill Dudney - JSF w/Eclipse and Creator</bold>
I thought Bill's talk was interesting and I thought it was cool the way you could easily create JSF stuff in the Java Studio Creator. Creating it in Eclipse seemed like a lot of work. The problem Chris pointed out is that it's what I paraphrase as the worst of both worlds. JSF using Java Studio Creator is complex enough that a person who normally would have used Excel or VB Forms couldn't use it, yet not necessarily as useful or powerful enough for a developer. I could see a developer maybe using it and then changing what Creator generates. Maybe by the next rev. it will be really easy to non developers to use. Bill's demo didn't work for the Mac but Creator can deploy the app. too and Bill said it's working pretty well on the PC platform. One thing Java Studio Creator did that was kind of slick was allow you to comment your code so that you just see a tag describing a code-chunk that you can click on it to expand and see the full code section.
Bill made the same comment I've heard before about Struts maybe being deprecated at some point because JSF would take it's place.
My question to Matt Raible is, would you personally use JSF yet, and if so would you choose to do it in Eclipse (or would it be MyEclipse?), Java Studio Creator, or IntelliJ?

There's my $.02,

Greg

Posted by Greg Ostravich on July 15, 2004 at 06:53 PM MDT #

Greg, something interesting one of my co-workers said today after seeing Java Studio Creator is that it would be great for smaller apps, but in actuality would be even better for prototyping. I'm going to give Creator a try next week and reproduce an existing app in it, since working with it 1st-person is always the best way to figure something out and learn it's strengths/weaknesses. Part of the question is whether Creator exposes all of the power of JSF or not. I may also try doing the app port with the new MyEclipse JSF plugins, and maybe with a demo version of Exadel JSF Studio, too, if time permits. I'd like try out Matt's Spring Live as well and do an all-Spring webapp. It's pretty nice right now at work because my workload is low so I can try out a ton of stuff I haven't been able to for the past year.

About JESS, it's definitely a niche product and not very interesting except for a small set of apps. I'd recommend checking out JRules or Rules4J or something like that to anyone evaluating JESS. They're more static than an expert system, but not too many apps need an "expert", just a set of rules and validations that can get complicated and need a good way of being expressed and put into their own layer.

Posted by gerryg on July 15, 2004 at 10:30 PM MDT #

I have been playing around with Creator in a Linux environment. I was all excited about it after JavaOne demos but I came back to reality after using it. I was trying to port a very simple app I did in Struts over to JSF with Creator and found it to be cumbersome. Ofcourse, as with any IDE, it may just be that I haven't taken enough time to work with it rather than fight it. I believe for now, I will use it to prototype an application before using IDEA and hand coding it. Oh yeah, here is a tip. I had to fight with Creator for a good hour or two to try and get it to add a components to a grid panel within another grid panel. I was able to get it to work by changing the height style of the internal grid panel to something like 600px. It would then be big enough to let me start adding components to it.

Posted by John Christopher on July 17, 2004 at 02:34 AM MDT #

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