Moving from here...

I'm moving this blog to wordpress. Do continue your patronage there. http://sudhin4coffee.wordpress.com/

Java™ Puzzlers

Started reading this interesting book by Joshua Bloch; Neal Gafter. I truly recommend this to all passionate Java developers.

For some insight, check http://www.javapuzzlers.com/.

Facebook Badge - A cool stuff

I just tried using it and my blog outline looks a little cool with the new Facebook badge.

Twenty Ten Resolution

I didn't touch this blog for over an year and I feel that I should get back on wheels now. I was very busy over the last year, settling down in my married life and getting done with the project I'm involved.

Things apart, lets get to business. I was looking for something and laid my eyes on this article. Let this serve as a starter for this year. Starbucks Does Not Use Two-Phase Commit by Gregor Hohpe - http://www.eaipatterns.com/ramblings/18_starbucks.html

This gives us a hint to avoid over engineering certain things if we could control it in other ways (maybe even by business process). Sometimes, these over engineering comes with the cost of stability or performance. I've been taught one thing from my childhood. If the problem is to make your hand touch the nose, there is a straight forward way instead of taking your hand around your head and making it touch the nose. So, when we sit down with the users for a requirement, let us first understand clearly what she wants instead of start thinking of ways to implement it. The How should be followed by the What always.

Let the rambling end for the time being.

JSF 1.2 and Websphere 6.1

Long time since blogged was busy at work; so lets get down to the business.

Our systems team told us that WAS 7.0 is still a distant reality and we'll be having WAS 6.1 (whichever approved patch) for the project we are working on. In the technical stack from the architecture team, we were recommended to use JSF 1.2 and Java EE 5 both not supported by WAS 6.1. If we use JSP as view, we would have an issue in making this combo work; there was a conflict in one of the classes (I don't remember exactly even after trying to make the application first class loader). This is where Facelets would come into picture; facelets with JSF 1.2 would work fine when we set the class loader priority as application first. More reasons to use Facelets are that it’s a viewhandler purely created for JSF and it’s faster than using with JSP because of the conflicting lifecycles of JSP and JSF.

If we want to use JSF 1.2, we would require setting the class loader as application first to overide the in-built JSF implementation available with WAS 6.1. AFAIK, this would work fine when we use Facelets. If we feel we need to stick to JSF1.1 to avoid this scenario, Facelets wouldn't work with the Sun RI's implementation of JSF 1.1 but it does with the MyFaces implementation of the same and as also with Sun RI of JSF1.2.

So we need to decide on the following:

1. WAS 6.1 + MyFaces JSF 1.1 + Facelets (this might also require a class loader as application first in WAS, not sure about it).

2. WAS 6.1 + MyFaces JSF 1.2 + Facelets (this requires a class loader as application first in WAS for sure)

3. WAS 6.1 + Sun JSF 1.1 + JSP + any other AJAX control framework like Richfaces/Icefaces. (I'm not comfortable with this combination especially after reading on the benefits of using Facelets).

Most likely, we might go with option 2 probably after a blessing from the architecture team.

Once more... this time I will

Its been sometimes since I wanted to be a Sun Certified Java Programmer. Something or other I just kept pushing things off, but this time I'm going to give it a hard shot. And maybe its for the reason that I've also bought a hard-bound copy of the SCJP 6 prep book by Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates. Yes folks, thats what I wanted to tell - the book is released. I got it from amazon - http://www.amazon.com/SCJP-Certified-Programmer-Java-310-065/dp/0071591060

If you are also in the same boat as me, all the very best to that.

Sun and RIA

JavaFX is being actively developed and once completed, it'll be a good bet in the RIA market. Per their direction, it is not recommended for developing commercial applications at this time as the contents of the JavaFX platform are subject to change, based on internal development schedules and customer feedback. One more thing that's making this curious is the new JavaFX script which is claimed to be superior to JavaScript and ActionScript. To keep a tab on the latest developments in this area, please add this to your favorites - http://www.javafx.com/. I really wanted to try my hand on this; lets see if we get some time for the same. One more interesting link for the same: http://forums.sun.com/category.jspa?categoryID=132

Happy learning...