Blogging Roller

One of the other things I did over the break was to start reading Core JSF again. I've made it about halfway through this time and I must say, the book is quite good. I like the way Geary and Horstmann walk you through the learning process. Starting with something small, simple and not IDE specific and slowly adding in the pieces you need to build a real app. For me, that approach dispelled the "JSF is too complex argument." I'm finding that JSF is a lot less complex than Struts, which is really all I have to compare it against. I might actually finish the book this time ;-)

At JavaOne, I picked up a copy of Java Creator 2 early access (EA) and I've been playing with that as well. I was hoping to build a simple JSF front-end for Roller, just for fun. Creator looks great and the form designer works well, but when I noticed how many com.sun.* classes end up in the generated code I backed off. According to the <a href= "http://developers.sun.com/prodtech/javatools/jscreator/ea/jsc2/reference/docs/Installation_ReleaseNotes-ea.html"> release notes the whole JSF implementation and com-sun-web-ui-appbase jars are redistributable (as are mail.jar and activation.jar -- that's news to me), but the idea of IDE specific code makes me uncomfortable -- especially in an open source context. So instead of using the form editor, I decided to base my little RollerFaces experiment on example code from Core JSF, which so far relies only on the javax.faces packages.

I decided not to use the form editor, but I didn't want to give up on Creator completely. So I tried to use Creator in place of Netbeans, but ran into another problem: Creator 2 EA only supports the Sun Java App Server and the built-in Netbeans Tomcat launch/debug feature has been disabled. That's disappointing. I don't want or need a full-blown EJB app server for this simple learning excercise. I want Tomcat. It's light-weight, starts fast and I know it well (as do most Java webapp developers, I expect). According to the Creator EA 2 docs, Tomcat support is coming soon. Personally, I would have supported Tomcat and simple webapps first and then Sun Java App Server and more advanced EJB stuff later. Please the most folks first, right? Anyhow, I backed off of Creator 2 EA entirely and now I'm hacking RollerFaces in Netbeans 4.1. I'll try Creator 2 again when it hits beta.