Evolutionnext latest blog entries

A Seam Developer Walks into a Grails Conference....

2008-07-08T06:40:53Z

...and so far so good...

Scott Davis' keynote presentation was great! He covered the whole perspective of differences and similarities between Java and Groovy. He reviewed all of the numbers on open-source (i.e., number of people using Java and Groovy; number of people using Apache over proprietary web servers; number of open source web frameworks over proprietary ones like Coldfusion; etc.) and the importance of open-source. Although there were few mentions of Groovy in the keynote, it definitely was inspirational and made me want to invest in the whole idea of open-source and Groovy.

While Scott does sound like a digital minister, he doesn't condemn anyone’s choice of programming language or web framework. Scott simply sells you on an option instead of on a dogmatic belief. The NFJS conference presenters employ a similar tactic, and they practice what they preach. Currently, I am sitting in on Programming DSLs with Groovy, presented by Venkat Subramaniam, who happens to be quite the programming language polyglot.

After this conference, I am going to gather all of the information that I can on Grails and make a post comparing and contrasting Grails and Seam. These frameworks are built on two separate ideals and I will try to be unbiased and academic in my opinions. I look forward to writing it.

'Agile Development with JBoss Seam' Download

2008-07-08T06:40:53Z

Here is the presentation of 'Agile Development with JBoss Seam' that I tried to give at JBoss World 2008 in Orlando Florida. I use the word 'try' because when I got on stage, I became so excited that I ended up expanding on every topic of every slide. Then, when the proctor indicated that there were only five minutes left, I started to freak out and sweat buckets - I had only gone through half of what I wanted to present! :( It was all downhill from there...

Unfortunately, the dry run that I gave to my JUG before-hand didn't help at all, because the atmosphere at JBoss World put me into a 'sharing' mode so that all I wanted to do was dump everything 'Seam' from my wet squishy brain onto the folks that attended my presentation.

So even though the actual presentation didn't go the way I wanted it, the work I put into it did.

To download the slides (format is OpenDocument Presentation), click here: www.evolutionnext.com/blog/files/jbossworld_presentation.odp

To download the demo seam-gen project, click here:
www.evolutionnext.com/blog/files/jboss_world_2008_download.zip

The download requires a little bit of setup. Don't worry, it isn't anything difficult. ;) All of the information you need is in the README.txt file (located in the demo seam-gen project zip file). The demo is licensed as GPLv3 to encompass all of the component's licenses.

I was thinking of maturing this little project as a reference implementation for testing in Seam. If anyone out there is interested in having me upkeep this demo, let me know. One consideration that I need to make is whether to host the demo from here or add it to the Seam project. I am leaning towards the latter.

JBoss World 2008, Orlando, Florida

2008-07-08T06:40:53Z

Just finished the first day at JBoss World 2008. There is no center theme, but there is certain buzz about the JBoss Developer Studio. The Studio features a great set of tools to get started with Seam Development. The demos are certainly outstanding and has made developers eager to try it out. As far as I gathered it is Eclipse based, but plugins for IDEs will be forthcoming.

The Keynote gave clarity to how jboss.org is set up for open-source development and community, and jboss.com is the production and support based website that will be their money maker.

The Introduction To Seam presentation got a lot of fanfare, so much so, that I wasn't able to get in on it. That's OK since I know Seam anyway. The BOF by far was the best part and perhaps the 2nd best reason for coming (the 1st being that I will be presenting Agile Development using JBoss Seam on Friday). I got a few of my questions out of the way.

My first question, was how to get rid of more of LIES (LazyInitializationExceptions) other than just use the SMPC. Pete Muir and Gavin King helped to explain that if I have a session scoped entity bean for example and have a conversation based session bean that has reference on the entity bean, then that session will naturally have issues with transaction locking and produce the LazyInitializationException. The overall answer was that LIES should never happen in JBoss Seam, and if you get the error message in anyway then you are obviously doing something wrong. I am going to have to research more about the scoping and workarounds and I will have an article posted either here on my blog, or in the seamframework.org website.

That brings me a to a great segue, the Seam Framework website is up and running out of alpha, and I got to say, that is absolutely impressive. If you need to see a complete implementation of jboss seam in a production environment sign up and try it.

The other question I asked is how I can inject components into my validators and converters in JSF without using Component.getInstance("<<component name>>"). Using the getInstance method of course makes testing very difficult. Pete Muir explained that their hands were tied. The reason for @BypassInterceptors and the use Component.getInstance("<<component name>>") is because jsf reserializes the validator or converter object, and in the JSF domain it cannot recognize the @In annotation and provide the correct injection.

That's it for now....currently I am attending the 2nd keynote with a complete "business value, paradigm shift, SOA, value added, ROI, service mix" happy business feel good discussion.