I have been trying to move application development out of the JSP ages for some time. JSP is well known and numerous developers are capable of supporting it but in many cases the results are underwhelming. Given more time, fewer projects and more senior developers maybe we could do a better job of making sure consistent JSP designs/implementations are always used. The primary goals being improving quality, reducing errors and easing maintenance/enhancements. The project work-load is only expected to increase over the next two years due to various grants and large projects already in planning/progress. The solution I decided on is the use of a component model (JSF 2) and related component suites. This reduces the need for lots of custom JavaScript (and expert JavaScript knowledge) and gains a lot of cross-browser testing by communities supporting many of the JSF libraries. The existing and upcoming applications/tools/utilities are using Struts 2 and JSP as the base technology but a "Struts 2 JSF plugin" allows integration into the Struts 2 environment. There are some posts/comments indicating that Struts 2 with JSF might have some benefits over a purely JSF implementation (authors preferring the Struts 2 navigation from what I can tell).
I previously toyed with JSF 1 for some time and was put off a bit by it and poor tool support in older versions of Eclipse. I had been toying with IceFaces 1.8 while trying to work with Mojarra or Apache MyFaces. I like aspects of IceFaces but fear getting sucked into needing paid support or the commercial components. There were also problems just getting it all working. So I let this research stagnate for a long time.
Upcoming projects inspired me to look into JSF again. I am pleased with the JSF 2 support in Eclipse (3.7.2) now. I made a somewhat informed decision to switch over to PrimeFaces 3.2 from IceFaces. I also switched over to Mojarra. I am a fan of Glassfish (but use Tomcat more) so having this consistency (by using Mojarra) makes sense for now. I had performed some research into RichFaces, IceFaces 2/3, Apache Trinidad and some others before settling on PrimeFaces. It appears to have a good selection of components, reasonable performance and a helpful community. There isn't anything fundamentally wrong with the others but this seemed like a better fit and initial prototyping was successful earlier than with other options.
Even though integrating new functionality using JSF into a moderate sized Struts 2/JSP application isn't trivial, it is going reasonably well. I hope to also replace some limited functionality with JSF over the next few weeks. This will provide an opportunity to target internal-only users with the result of the much more refined functionality and help justify future updates which are public facing.
My only major disappointment is a lack of comprehensive examples which show small scale but somewhat realistic implementations specifically for JSF 2. There is lots of JSF 1 information which doesn't reflect current best practice for JSF 2. I expect to be working in the debugger and reviewing generated HTML for a while until I figure out good ways to promote efficient results.
As a side note, I also took a stab at integrating JBoss Seam but that wasn't going as well as hoped. Again, there are some good things there but I prefer something which is an improvement and easy to get functional quickly. I was spending way too much time trying to figure out Seam issues rather than generating useful work results. If we ever have to convert to JBoss then this would likely be an easier move but in the foreseeable future Tomcat 7 is the best fit with JSF 2/Struts 2/PrimeFaces 3 with some Glassfish 3 thrown in here and there. I dumped WebLogic - Swiss army knife which is bloated, expensive and hard to integrate into our overall infrastructure.
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Thursday, May 17, 2012
Maimer of trees - taking after mom
My daughter enjoys riding dirt bikes and that is something we share. She has certainly improved over time but she continues to give us some memorable stories.
The first story is about her somehow clipping the neighbors large tree as she tried to navigate between it and our garden. The result was her basically going over the handlebars of her little 50cc Suzuki. She was sore and bruised for a long while but she got back on shortly after that and continues to ride. I am proud of her for not giving it up after that - many kids would have. Now when she gets hurt in other activities we use this as a way to get a relative severity level "which hurt worse this or when you hit the tree". So far the tree is still the winner - hoping and praying it stays that way.
We now have another tree story. We planted 7 fruit trees this spring - 3 apple, 2 peach and 2 cherry. We placed the peach trees near the garden, the cherry trees out front and the apple trees along our road. We thought the peach trees died since they had no signs of leafing out. One day I was working out in the driveway and watching my daughter go around the house on her motorcycle. At a certain point I realized that she had not come around and I could not hear her. I admit to a panicked feeling but as I started around the house I saw her walking towards me while taking her helmet off. She didn't look hurt and then I saw it. The dirt bike laying in the grass and one of the peach trees ripped out the ground. Her first words were "sorry". I was so thankful that she wasn't hurt! She was concerned that I would be mad about the tree. I still don't know exactly what happened but she sometimes goes a little too fast and probably wasn't quite looking where she should have been. It was a lesson learned the hard way.
A bright note is that I put the "dead" tree back in the ground and wrapped its "boo boos" with burlap and told my daughter that it seemed dead already. The funny thing is that the accident was over a month ago and we just noticed leaves finally sprouting from that tree. It is still wrapped in burlap where the bark got scrapped/ripped down. No idea of what the end result will be but we are claiming that the tree is "fighting through damage".
Oh, and the "taking after mom" part of this posts subject is because my wife backed our truck into some bushes one time. No damage to them or us but for a while we nick named her "bush killer". I'm thinking I should be the one to teach the kids to drive when the time comes.. :)
In the mean time, I should find more time to play "follow the leader" with my daughter on dirt bikes and avoid getting close to the large immovable objects.
The first story is about her somehow clipping the neighbors large tree as she tried to navigate between it and our garden. The result was her basically going over the handlebars of her little 50cc Suzuki. She was sore and bruised for a long while but she got back on shortly after that and continues to ride. I am proud of her for not giving it up after that - many kids would have. Now when she gets hurt in other activities we use this as a way to get a relative severity level "which hurt worse this or when you hit the tree". So far the tree is still the winner - hoping and praying it stays that way.
We now have another tree story. We planted 7 fruit trees this spring - 3 apple, 2 peach and 2 cherry. We placed the peach trees near the garden, the cherry trees out front and the apple trees along our road. We thought the peach trees died since they had no signs of leafing out. One day I was working out in the driveway and watching my daughter go around the house on her motorcycle. At a certain point I realized that she had not come around and I could not hear her. I admit to a panicked feeling but as I started around the house I saw her walking towards me while taking her helmet off. She didn't look hurt and then I saw it. The dirt bike laying in the grass and one of the peach trees ripped out the ground. Her first words were "sorry". I was so thankful that she wasn't hurt! She was concerned that I would be mad about the tree. I still don't know exactly what happened but she sometimes goes a little too fast and probably wasn't quite looking where she should have been. It was a lesson learned the hard way.
A bright note is that I put the "dead" tree back in the ground and wrapped its "boo boos" with burlap and told my daughter that it seemed dead already. The funny thing is that the accident was over a month ago and we just noticed leaves finally sprouting from that tree. It is still wrapped in burlap where the bark got scrapped/ripped down. No idea of what the end result will be but we are claiming that the tree is "fighting through damage".
Oh, and the "taking after mom" part of this posts subject is because my wife backed our truck into some bushes one time. No damage to them or us but for a while we nick named her "bush killer". I'm thinking I should be the one to teach the kids to drive when the time comes.. :)
In the mean time, I should find more time to play "follow the leader" with my daughter on dirt bikes and avoid getting close to the large immovable objects.
Arduino microcontrollers are awesome
I bought an Arduino Uno "for my son" at Christmas .. ok, maybe it was for me as well. I picked up a couple books and worked through some of the projects with my son. Really neat stuff.
Biggest problems are time, the fact I need to get bifocals so I can see the parts well enough and keeping it interesting for son.
I would like us to work on some flying projects like a from scratch multi-copter (either a tricopter or quadcopter).
Examples:
http://www.blueskyrc.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=16
http://aeroquad.com/
Biggest problems are time, the fact I need to get bifocals so I can see the parts well enough and keeping it interesting for son.
I would like us to work on some flying projects like a from scratch multi-copter (either a tricopter or quadcopter).
Examples:
http://www.blueskyrc.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=16
http://aeroquad.com/
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