Thursday
Thursday began with a
late morning meeting, followed by lunch (the first time I actually
ate the free lunch provided by the conference). Afterwards, I happily
attended a non-JSF session called "Beyond Blogging: Feed
Syndication and Publishing with Java Technology". As you can
imagine, feed syndication is an important part of JSFCentral, so
this was an interesting session for me. One of the presenters was
Dave Johnson, author of the Roller blogging application and the
upcoming Manning book RSS
and Atom in Action. I'm a (slack) technical reviewer
for that book, so it was a pleasure to meet Dave in person to tell
him how impressed I am with his writing. If you're interested in RSS
or feed syndication, you should definitely check out Dave's book - it
comes out this fall.
The next session was
held by possibly the loudest and most vocal member of the Oracle Java
tools team -- JSF expert group member and ADF Faces Components
architect Adam Winer. Adam and his colleague Christian Straub
presented a session entitled "Extreme Reuse in JavaServer
Faces", which discussed methods for templating with JSF. After
examining some frustrating nuances of using techniques such as JSP
2.0 tag libraries, Tiles, and SiteMesh (which doesn't really work
with JSF at all), the two concluded that the best approach was to
simply use JSF components. (The primary problem with JSP tag files
and Tiles is that they aren't really aware of JSF, and vice-versa.)
They demonstrated how Oracle's ADF Faces components handle templates
in a manner that is conceptually similar to Tiles, in some ways, but
is implemented using pure JSF components. Hopefully we'll be able to
tackle the templating issue in future versions of JSF.
Speaking of standards,
we JSF expert group members in the crowd made our way to the annual
WebTier alignment meeting, where members of the Servlet, JSP, and JSF
expert groups get together and discuss the key issues involving the
web tier. These meetings were started last year by former JSP spec
lead Mark Roth, and it was a great catalyst for the work that we've
done in the last year to make web development on the Java platform
more seamless. Included were Ed Burns, Roger
Kitain, Pierre Delisle, Greg Murray, Amy Roh, Jason
Hunter, Matt
Raible, Stephane Bastian, Adam Winer, Felipe
Leme, and several others. After a lively 2 1/2
hour discussion, I think you can be sure that good things are in
store for the future of the J2EE Web Tier.
Once the meeting ended,
I strolled back towards the Moscone Center for one last glimpse of
the conference. Nibbling on a granola bar, I tried to enter, only to
be told that the conference was officially over. With a final look at
the Java geeks with their JavaOne backpacks strung over one shoulder,
I hopped into the shuttle bus back to my hotel. After packing, I went
out for dinner with an old friend, and we discussed life and, of
course, Java (he's a Java developer as well).
During the evening
flight back to the east coast I reflected on the conference, and
Java's 10th anniversary. Has it really been that long
since I saw the first applet on a web page and printed out the Java
Language Specification? It was a long week, but the energy of the
15,000 attendees was fantastic, and JSF was truly the star of the
show. It's quite clear that JSF has a bright future.
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