There’s still a lot of confusion over the difference types of managed beans provided in Java EE 6 with EJBs, CDI beans and JSF managed beans all being available. This article aims to clear up some of the differences between the them and define when to use them. (more…)

It seems in the last few weeks or so the Maven JSTL dependency has vanished from at least the central repository. This has caused a number of issues around the web.
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In the last few weeks I have been rather busy working on a new project with Rick Hightower, who is fairly well known for his training and writings on Spring and JSF, and Rob WIlliams who is a blogger known as much for meddling in new technologies (and getting mad at them) as he is for intertwining various historical and literary references in his posts. The result of this is the CDISource project which aims to advocate and facilitate the use of the JSR 299 – Java Contexts and Dependency Injection framework across the Java landscape.

If you’ve seen my posts or my site before, you’ll no doubt be aware that I have written at great length about Java EE 6, JSF, CDI , EJB and so on. What I haven’t written about is the many frustrations I’ve come up against in dealing with these frameworks on their own and especially when combined, or how their usefulness is often constrained to the application server container.

Java EE in some ways is an archipelago of frameworks that lacks the cohesiveness and all in one wide screen vision that software developers need. Java EE is about the enterprise, in reality its about the web, or even more specifically about Java EE containers. There’s a whole slew of uses for a good type safe and flexible dependency injection and AOP framework and such as CDI outside of Java EE containers but there is very little information and code to make it actually work.

Our goal is to make CDI useful and usable on its own without Java EE 6, and to give developers the tools and information to do so. To let them write vendor neutral and portable code, and apply agile and best practices. Developers know how to write good software and don’t want to sacrifice that for the sake of using a framework to make things easier. To that end we aim to provide code and information that will help facilitate those practices.

There will be some learning for ourselves along the way and we will have to change some of our previously held concepts. I know over the last few weeks having been getting CDI working and useful outside of the web container it has really altered my perspective on how I think about the dependencies and structure in CDI applications. My perspective has changed even more than when I wrote A Little Less Conversation.

As much as I hate to say it, we did come up with a mission statement, although we found it fairly easy and enjoyable to clearly defined the goals and attitudes of the project.

Our mission is to :

• Promote and facilitate the use of the Java Context and Dependency Injection (CDI) framework in relation to as many aspects of application development as possible.
• Enable developers to take advantage of CDI independently of Java EE.
• Provide lightweight, lean and agile access to the underlying CDI container as a core principle in our efforts.
• Make testing easy without requiring a complex set of tools or complex deployment scenarios.
• Enhance both Java EE development as well as the use of CDI in non Java EE application where possible.
• Promote and enable the use of CDI in a vendor neutral environment and maximize the portability of application code across CDI implementations.
• Not reject the ideas of Java EE but expand the usability of CDI outside the borders of Java EE application servers with frameworks that are not a part of the specification.
• Not reject other CDI efforts but to provide another venue to promote those efforts. This is an addition. This is another voice in support of CDI.

We are pretty excited that so far we have been able to live up to the intent of our mission statement with everything we’ve done so far. Over the next few days and weeks you will see articles and tutorials come out of Rick, Rob and I as we write about the CDISource project and we start to showcase some of the code we have written and start giving you an idea of where we are heading.

Right now we have vendor neutral support for starting up CDI outside of the web container and also for testing CDI beans with minimal configuration and intrusion on your test cases. We also have a few other pieces that are nearly ready, as well as dozens of ideas to get started on.

You can start by looking at Ricks brand new introduction of CDI over on JavaLobby.

In part 2 of this article, we are going to create a data driven web service that will return JSON and XML to the client, and then use jQuery to add a new item to the database and display it in our page.
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There was a thread on the JSF LinkedIn group about JSF performance and a number of people complained about the fact that as part of the restore view phase, JSF reconstructs the component tree including binding data to data tables causing unnecessary fetches of data from the database. This article looks at one way of avoiding the additional work to fetch the data.
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If you’ve used Shrinkwrap you might have noticed that creating configuration files can be a bit of a burden requiring you to manually build XML configuration files yourself as strings. This article shows how the DSLs being added to Shrinkwrap will make configuring your deployments far easier.
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Adam Bien wrote about the Troubled with the crippled Java EE 6 APIs in Maven and a solution for them. Another solution has presented itself now that JBoss has finalized the Java EE 6 spec pom and added it to their public repositories as of early January 2011.

You can include the spec in your own project by adding the following to your pom.xml :

<dependency>
	<groupId>org.jboss.spec</groupId>
	<artifactId>jboss-javaee-6.0</artifactId>
	<version>1.0.0.Final</version>
	<type>pom</type>
</dependency>

You may also need to add the JBoss repository to your pom.xml which is defined as :

<repositories>
	<repository>
		<id>repository.jboss.org</id>
		<name>JBoss Repository</name>
		<url>http://repository.jboss.org/nexus/content/groups/public-jboss/</url>
	</repository>
</repositories>

I’ll be adding this pom to the Knappsack archetypes to resolve some of the issues people have been facing with the broken spec dependency.

One thing that I wrote that I haven’t really gotten around to examining and verifying in closer detail and validating my position on is the production of the conversational entity manager in the Knappsack archetypes. This article looks at this and re-evaluates my thinking on the use of conversational contexts in CDI.
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In this post we looked at adding String resource bundles to our JSF applications to move our string constants into external resources that we can define for different locales. Now I want to extend that example to show how you can expand on that by using injection to access those resources.
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A post on Javalobby (Are Serverside Web Frameworks Becoming Irrelevant?) got me thinking again about javascript based web apps also called SOFEA or SOUI applications. While I don’t believe that the end is near for server side frameworks, (after all a similar post was written 3 years ago), I think it there is a growing interest in these development models.

Now and again I take a look at javascript based client side web development interacting with web services since the notion of a thick, rich client using distributed stateless reusable web services that can just be deployed off into the cloud can be very alluring.
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