Sean Brydon's Blog

JavaOne 2007 talk on Blueprints for Mashups: Practical Strategies, Tips, and Code for Designing and Building

If you are attending JavaOne 2007 and are interested in learning more about mashups, the talk titled Blueprints for Mashups: Practical Strategies, Tips, and Code for Designing and Building (TS-6676) should be a good talk to attend. Its on Thursday May 10, 2007 10:55 to 11:55. The speakers are Sean Brydon (me), Mark Basler, and Gregory Murray.

Basicallly a mashup is a web site or application that combines content from more than one source, typically another service on the web, into a single web application.

From the abstract: "Web applications are making their functionality and data available as a live service, so that other applications can combine, or mash up, with those live services to offer a new and creative user experience. This presentation identifies some of the key problems and issues facing developers and provides some practical strategies and code examples for successfully jump-starting your own mashups. The session looks under the hood, examines popular live services, and identifies common problems and some of the underlying designs and technical choices of building mashup applications. It also discusses some of the issues you face when building your own live mashups. After exploring the concepts, the session discusses building a web application as a service and also building a mashup that combines [these services]."

Since not everyone can attend JavaOne, I will try to blog soon about the contents in the talk and maybe post the slides after JavaOne.

What topics would you expect to be covered in a talk like this?

hope to see you there,
Sean

Free Online JavaOne 2006 BluePrints Talk for Building Ajax and Java Web Applications on Java EE 5

The Java BluePrints talk for JavaOne 2006 is online and free. The talk, "Java BluePrints for Ajax-Enabled Web 2.0 Applications", discusses design choices for building a web application on the Java EE 5 platform. This talk covers some of the design choices and decisions made for the new Java Petstore 2.0, including

When to use Ajax
Page is the application style of architecture
Applying the Model View Controller pattern
Leveraging existing Ajax Libraries
Designing a JSF Ajax-enabled component library
Mashup architecture choices
Design choices in the domain model
And a lot more

The talk is about an hour long. We ran a little bit short on time so rushed a bit at the end of the talk. The speakers were: Sean Brydon (me), Inderjeet Singh, Greg Murray, and Mark Basler.

You get a slide show that moves along with the recorded audio for the JavaOne talk we gave this year. The slide show has a written transcript of the presentations also. You can pause, fast forward, rewind. You can also can download a pdf of the slides, but slides alone do not give you as much information. You do need to create an SDN(Sun developer Network) login (also free).

Also, the other talks from 2005 and 2006 are available online also. Many developers go to JavaOne, but a lot more don't get to go, so this is a good way to see some of the talks. There are some other online Ajax talks from JavaOne 2006 also. For example,

Introduction to AJAX : TS-4489 by Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith.
Using the Dojo Toolkit to Develop AJAX-Enabled Java EE Web Applications : TS-3577 by Alex Russell and Gregory Murray
Evolving JavaServer Faces Technology: AJAX Done Right : TS-1161 by Adam Winer, Ed Burns, and Jacob Hookom.
Smackdown for AJAX Programming Models and Frameworks : TS-2991 with representatives from DOJO, Flex, Swing, and JSF.
Java Technology Techniques for Developing AJAX Applications : TS-3376 by some Google engineers Joel Webber and Bruce Johnson. It discusses GWT, the Google Web Toolkit
JavaServer Faces, AJAX and Portlets: Developing Apps Without Distress : TS-6877 by Brendan Murray
AJAX & Persistence: Emerging Patterns & Pain Points : TS-8614 by Larry White and Craig Russell

And a few more talks about Ajax as well, if you have time for a mini JavaOne about Ajax.

The best way to experience the Java BluePrints talk for JavaOne 2006 is online and free-- you dont even have to watch us sweat on stage.

Need a Reference Application or BluePrint for AJAX and Java?

Designing and building a web application using AJAX and Java EE 5 can present a lot of challenges to developers:

how much AJAX to use and where to use it
how to apply Model View Contoller and other design patterns
how to build your domain model with Java Persistence APIs
whether to return XML or HTML or JSON to service XMLHttpRequests
how to leverage RSS feeds as data sources
how to mash up with Google Map APIs to provide location-specific searches of your data
how to wrap AJAX in JSF components
how to incorporate an existing AJAX library like DOJO toolkit
how to choose a convention for JavaScript you write
and many other design choices

The Java Pet Store 2.0, Early Access, provides a reference application illustrating the blueprints for designing a complex AJAX web application on Java EE 5. The Java Petstore 2.0 runs on a Java EE application server such as the Java EE 5 SDK or the GlassFish project.

Download the first early access public release of Java Pet Store 2.0!
The download also includes a NetBeans project to make it easy to use in an IDE.

Java BluePrints for AJAX New Online Solutions Catalog

As part of the Java BluePrints we have been investigating and experimenting with the programming model for using AJAX on Java EE 5. One programming model we have been covering is using Java Server Faces (JSF) with AJAX. For example, how to design a JSF component library around an AJAX library like DOJO toolkit. Its simple to build a single JSF component around a JavaScript/AJAX widget, but lots of issues come up when you try to build a larger set of components. To try and flesh out those issues we built a set of AJAX-enabled JSF components to test out our ideas. You can try out the components in your own app as well as check out the code to give you ideas when designing your own applications. In addition to looking at the JSF and AJAX programming model, we also have been experimenting a bit with alternative programming models like having a JavaScript-centric client with a Java server-tier using Servlets instead of JSF components to handle AJAX interactions.
We try to capture all the programming model issues and guidelines in the Java BluePrints Solutions catalog, which we just released. And just today we made the new design solutions available online.
Check out the new online version of the Java BluePrints Solutions Catalog and the section on using AJAX with Java . These are the design docs we have started:

Do you prefer using AJAX with Servlets or AJAX with JSF? Which programming model do you prefer? This is all in Early Access so help us improve the blueprints.
If you want to try out the set of JSF AJAX components, give the mini-applications a test drive on GlassFish, or just check out the code, then download the latest release of the solutions catalog. Let us know if you like the AJAX components and the solution designs? What ideas would you like to see explored by the Java BluePrints for AJAX?