Granted, in the first entry, I made all of the links live, so it's sort of perpetually updated. Unfortunately, the updated graphs may render the prose inaccurate. This time I'll put the actual images up in order to maintain blog posting integrity.

First up, let's see how JSF is doing against modern web frameworks:

Note that it's #1 in terms of US job postings. On its heels, though, are Flex and Rails, which have more steep adoption curves. Perhaps JSF 2 will help with that :-).

Now, let's compare all of these with Struts:

Man, some things take forever to die... (Struts 2, which is actually quite good, garners a very small percentage of this.)

What about ASP.NET?

Yikes! So, I guess this points to the whole Java market fragmentation problem. If we filter out Flex (more like Silverlight), and Rails (not Java -- well, not always Java), what do we get?

Oh well. Didn't help as much as I had hoped, even with Spring MVC...

Indeed, job stats aren't the ultimate indicator of a product's success... but they are a useful guide. Fortunately, the trends for JSF and several others are upward :-).

I think we've truly put together an excellent lineup of speakers who are deep into JSF: Ed Burns, David Geary, Keith Donald, Chris Schalk, Michael Yaun, Ed Burns, Max Katz, Ted Goddard, Jeremy Grelle, Stan Silvert, myself, and others.

The conference is tailored for application developers, solution architects, and project managers who develop applications with JavaServer Faces, Seam, Spring, and related technologies. Key topics include:

* JSF 2.0
* Facelets
* Spring integration
* Seam
* iPhone
* Google API integration
* Writing custom components
* Sripting JSF
* Portlet development
* Testing
* Component suites like RichFaces, ICEfaces, and others

The conference will also be running in conjunction with The Rich Web Experience East -- you get two shows for the price of one. The Rich Web Experience is a one-shop-stop for all things related to Ajax, RIAs, and the evolution of the browser.

If this sounds interesting, you should definitely join us at JSFOne this September 4th-6th in the Washington, DC area! (We're also giving away new iPhones, too.)

Also, stay tuned to JSFCentral for new content from our speakers.

I'm presenting a few talks about JSF (surprise!) covering the JSF Ecosystem, JBoss Seam, AJAX and JSF, and Spring and JSF integration (you can find a full list on the NFJS site).

I just finished stops in St Louis and Atlanta. Next up is Minneapolis (this weekend), and then I'll be in Reston come November. It's fun to be back on the tour -- it's been a couple of years. Lots of great speakers and smart attendees. I encourage you to check out the show when it comes to your town!

Jonas and John spent years at Oracle working with ADF Faces, and also wrote Pro JSF and Ajax. Now they've created a new company, Kaazing, focusing on Enterprise Comet.

There are plenty of comet solutions out there (ICEfaces is the most notable one in the JSF space). Kaazing's solution, however, is unique. At its core is the Chai VM, which essentially translates an ordinary desktop Java app into a web-based realtime application. No web development at all (you use Swing instead).

Interesting stuff indeed. Swing, however, is still a bit tedious. It'll be nice interesting to see how the Chai VM works with JavaFX once the JavaFX compiler is finished...

So, what does Kaazing stand for? Beats me. No hits from dictionary.com...

As a footnote, it's sad that these two won't be as vocal in the JSF space. I'm very happy to see this new company, however. Good luck, guys!

Even when I was using JBuilder, a friend of mine and I often concluded that Borland should be selling the best suite of Eclipse plugins on the market. While I was glad to see JBuilder 2007 reborn on top of Eclipse, I was intrigued, but not sold. (Granted, I did always love Together, which is integrated, along with OptimizeIt!). Admittedly, part of my resistance was the lack of any additional JSF tooling, which is my primary concern.

With JBuilder 2007, the pricing has come down quite a bit -- the standard version only costs $499, which is squarely aimed at IntelliJ. But Borland has just moved a step closer to the light by introducing JGear, which is basically JBuilder 2007 sold as three separate plugins (plus a server portion for its collaboration tools) that work with existing Eclipse installs. So, if you're using MyEclipse but you want profiling, you can just add JGear Performance. Or, if you're using BEA Workshop, you can add JGear Team client plugin. And the pricing is actually reasonable; the plugins start at $299.

Am I excited? More so than usual. I think Borland really has seen the light. Is it too late? Maybe so. But late is always better than never...

So, without further ado, here are the sessions:

TS-6178 Simplifying JavaServer Faces Component Development

The benefits of using JavaServer Faces UI components to rapidly construct complex, interactive user interfaces have become quite clear over the past couple of years. However, the process of developing these UI components is currently quite tedious. This presentation examines techniques for easing the process of developing components with techniques such as annotations, convention over configuration, and templating.

TS-7082 Building JavaServer Faces Applications with Spring and Hibernate with Chris Richardson.

JavaServer Faces technology is emerging as a powerful force for building web applications. With its extensive array of UI component options, Ajax support, and basic application infrastructure, developers are building sophisticated, interactive web UIs with less effort, but it is a view layer framework. What if your service layer is written with Spring and Hibernate? This session explains when you might want to use JavaServer Faces technology with Spring and Hibernate and discusses possible integration options such as Spring 2, the JavaServer Faces technology/Spring integration library, and Shale/Spring integration. It begins by examining the use cases for using these three technologies together and expands upon the topic with a demo of integrating a Spring/Hibernate service layer into a JavaServer Faces user interface.

BOF-4400 Improve and Expand JavaServer Faces Technology with JBoss Seam with Michael Yuan.

JBoss Seam is a very popular open-source application framework for Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 5.0. For web application developers, a significant benefit of Seam is that it greatly enhances JavaServer Faces technology. For instance, Seam allows you to do the following with your JavaServer Faces technology-based application:

• Use components based on Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 3 architecture directly as JavaServer Faces technology-based backing beans

• Improve ORM integration (no DTOs or lazy loading exceptions)

• Integrate business process and application state into page flow

• Use end-to-end validators on entity objects to replace JavaServer Faces technology-based validators

• Get fully decorated input fields when a validation error occurs

• Get improved date/time handling at the server’s default time zone

• Write RESTful web pages

• Easily manage JavaServer Faces technology-based messages for both successful and failed operations

• Do greatly simplified coding for clickable lists

• Use extended syntax for the JavaServer Faces technology-based expression language to reduce back-end coding

• Make expanded use of JavaServer Faces technology-based expression language for configuration files, business process definition, test cases, and so on

• Get direct JavaScript programming language remoting access to back-end components (Ajax)


Furthermore, Seam integrates with almost all leading JavaServer Faces technology-based component frameworks to support rich UI and Ajax components.

This presentation introduces Seam web features from the perspective of a developer on the JavaServer Faces platform. It uses a lot of code examples and demonstrates live applications. It also discusses RAD tools for getting a Seam JavaServer Faces technology-based project started. Developers attending this presentation will leave with a basic understanding of exactly what Seam is, what problems it solves, and how to get started.

I must point out a couple of excellent videos that have come out: JavaPolis Marriage Proposal, and Frank Cohen's video montage (complete with drunken speakers such as myself): JavaPolis2006. You can also check out pictures on Flickr. Hopefully I'll add some of my own after I develop pictures from my disposable camera...had a slight mishap with my camcorder...

At this conference I recorded my first two podcasts -- one with Tom Hammel and Stephane Bastian from Infragistics (JSF component vendors), and one with Roger Kitian from Sun (JSF co-spec lead). Hopefully I'll get these up on JSF Central soon.

Anyway, it was a great show -- and Antwerp is a great city, too :-).

This JSF course begins by explaining what JavaServer Faces is, and how it relates to Struts and other web frameworks currently on the market. You will learn about key JSF concepts, and some of the architectural principals behind the framework. You will then learn about IDEs that support JSF, as well as libraries that facilitate JSF development, such as Struts Shale and Facelets. You will also learn about the current market for off-the-shelf user interface components, such as grids, menus, toolbars, trees, and tabbed panes.

On the last day, you will work on the integration of selected libraries and components with the sample application. We will examine different techniques for structuring JavaServer Faces (JSF) applications, paying attention to the consequences of each technique. You will learn how different IDEs approach JSF development, and how these may or may not work within your architectural constraints. We'll also examine the extension points within JSF, and how they can be leveraged to provide features such as security, alternate templating technology, and access to external resources.

This seminar covers the tools and techniques for developing responsive, attractive AJAX-enabled applications using JavaServer Faces (JSF) technology without the use of manually-coded JavaScript.

This seminar will be hosted by Skills Matter, and you can read the details here.

I'll be teaching JSF for two days, Chris Richardson (Author of POJOs in Action) will be covering Hibernate and Spring, Max Katz (Senior Engineer at Exadel) will be covering JSF and AJAX, and Jonathan Wetherbee (Oraclee's EJB 3 tech lead) will be covering EJB 3. There are also panels on web dev and persistence in the evening. (If you want to hear what Max Kataz has to say, check out this interview on JSF Central).

If you're interested in relavent, in-depth training at an affordable price, check out Open Source Live!

And, if you don't have a copy, don't worry -- you can buy one at the book store :-).