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Posted by editor on June 7, 2007 at 5:21 AM PDT


Combining your preferred client- and server-side technologies

Ajax and JSF would on the surface seem to be two technologies that would be difficult to marry. Ajax processing is predominantly client side, while JSF processing is predominantly server side. Ajax is mostly JavaScript and JSF is Java.

So, does it even make sense to put them together, or do we leave the sever-side to the Java developers and the Ajax client-stuff to the JavaScript types, and hope they manage to integrate at some point before production? Author Chris Hardin argues for integrating much earlier... in fact, to put the Ajax support into custom JSF components.

In our Feature Article,

Bundling Ajax into JSF components, Chris Hardin shows how to do this with custom or extended JSF components, using a PhaseListener to deliver Ajax content to the response, and embedding JavaScript content via the renderer class.

Chris adds that this isn't the only place you'll see this idea: "there are already many Ajax-enabled JSF components already out there and most are open source. The ability to create reusable dynamic web components is where the power in the coupling of JSF and Ajax lies."

In Java Today,

InfoQ reports Geronimo has passed the Java EE 5 compatibility test suite. "The Apache Geronimo project has passed a significant milestone in that their latest release candidate (2.0-M6-rc1) has passed all tests in the Java Enterprise Edition 5.0 Compatibility Test Suite, making it the first open source application server other than Glassfish to pass the tests."

Jasper Potts has posted a Nimbus L&F Update: "So it has been a while since I blogged about Nimbus, Java One has come and gone and I am sure you are all wondering whats happening to it. Well things have changed for Nimbus since it was announced at Desktop Matters conference in March. The initial plan was for Nimbus to be a open source project jointly run by Ben Galbraith and myself. In early prototype I hacked together thats available from nimbus.dev.java.net was very well accepted both inside Sun and in the swing community. As a result a decision was made to bring the Nimbus L&F; into the JDK as part of the new Consumer JRE."

The JRuby team has announced JRuby 1.0.0RC3. "This will likely be our final release candidate before our 1.0 release. People are encouraged to try out this release to help us find any remaining showstopper issues. We
have spent a lot of time over the last month squashing compatibility bugs and we have
confidence that applications 'will just work' (tm)*. Please try your applications and
libraries against JRuby and give us feedback."

Mark Lam computes The Price of Speed to ME developers in today's Weblogs. "Java ME is typically deployed in resource constrained devices. We like JIT compilers because they can make Java applications run fast on these devices. But how much overhead do they incur? Come find out."

Airlan San Juan asks the provocative question
Are Java desktop developers giving Java a bad name?
"When dealing with antagonistic parties, most recently in the Blu-ray arena, I noticed that their examples of bad Java applications almost always revolves around bad experiences with either Java desktop applications or applets."

Finally, Norbert Truchsess considers
going asynchonous with JSF?
"Even if the spec claims it's not true, JSF 1.2 is quite tightly coupled to http and you will have a hard time to use in other context than that. Ever tried to do something with the component-tree while there's no request from a browser like sending a jms-message directly to a component?"

In today's Forums,
adaptives considers the effects of changing an API to use runtime exceptions, in
Re: Exception design.
"This is again a hypothetical situation on top of yours. If you had written a framework or libraries on top of their SDK, where some of your classes threw AcmeException. When you designed the classes AcmeException was a subclass of Exception, hence your classes were designed with the assumption that you are throwing a checked exception that will be handled by clients. Now suddenly it has become an unchecked exception and clients need not handle it. Had your designed assumed some cleanup code at the clients end if they caught the exception, then you may have to wrap AcmeException into a checked exception and throw that instead, causing you to slightly change your design and recompile code."

sbogrett explains a decision to abandon NIO DirectBuffers in
Re: jdk1.6.0rc crash.
"In our application we made extensive use of NIO and DirectBuffers. When we stopped using DirectBuffers we saw this issue go away. We still use NIO but simply allocated java heap buffers instead of direct memory buffers. We tried every setting and configuration we could think of but none seemed to work so long as we used DirectBuffers. We used substantial sizes... approaching 32 megabytes of direct memory but as I indicated earlier we were running on a machine with plenty of memory... both virtual and physical. We will try to use DirectBuffers again with 1.6.0 u2 but since we have a workaround we probably won't spend lots of time investigating if the failure reappers with direct memory."

Finally, hocmin discusses apparent SwingX model-view inconsistencies in
Updating JXTable after a model change.
"I've got a JXTable whose TableModel changes from time to time. My problem is, if the user reorders items in the table via the sorting functionality, the next time the model is changed, the table doesn't seem to update properly. It seems like the sorter isn't aware of the change and still tries to access the old items. This is especially problematic if the new model has fewer items. Is there a way to propagate the changes to every part of the JXTable?"

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Combining your preferred client- and server-side technologies

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