RichFaces plugin Released for NetBeans 6.1

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Last week Geertjan Wielanga released a plugin he’d been working on for RichFaces tag support in NetBeans. I gave it a shot and its not bad.

Its meant to provide tag support as well as drag and drop of RichFaces controls on the palette. Interestingly this support is meant for both jsps and facelets. But seriously speaking, how many people are using RichFaces on jsps instead of on Facelets? Since this plugin only works with NetBeans 6.1 and the facelets support plugin does not work with 6.1, I really wonder what use it is to me and to a significant number of others.

This is really causing me to worry for Sun. Anyone doing anything new in JSF is not going with JSPs if they really know what is best for them, but rather with Facelets. If Sun really wants JSF to catch up (alongside using NetBeans as their preferred JSF development tool) then they should provide us developers with at least some of what JBoss Tools provides – visual editing. I’ve been waiting for Sun’s Visual JSF to now support Facelets, cos there’s no way I’m sticking with Rave. I think a lot of people share this sentiment and it is the reason why everyone is praising Seam for the good work its doing.

If Sun has seen it fit to bring Jacob Hookom onto the JSF 2 EG as a sign of respect for what Facelets stands for, then it should stop sitting on the sidewalk with Facelets support in NetBeans and get some decent support for it (and I mean not just tag support). Most of us NetBeans fans are in a love hate relationship with it because of such political (in)decisions. Sun should continue taking developers seriously and see how to improve on it’s technologies with already proven ones instead of trying to stuff things down our throats that we don’t want to swallow.

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28th May 2008

Ah. I just came across a release of the Facelets support for NetBeans 6.0 rebuilt to work with NetBeans 6.1. Good job by http://ifnu.artivisi.com. Here is the download. And thanks to Po-Ting Wu for the rebuild instructions.

Thanks also to Geertjan for the work on Richfaces support. JSF development will get better and easier!

GenKey Africa Is here

o by God’s grace I was confronted with the choice of learning for an MSc in Networks and Distributed Systems and doing networks and distributed systems real hand with stuff like SOA, ESBs, Web Services, SVN etc. Well, I give it a very long thought (about 5 minutes) and decided to go for the latter. So here I am in East Legon, Accra with Diabeney Agyiri-Tetteh and Wesley Kirinya from Kenya.

GenKey Africa has started and the first week has been challenging enough already. As if that is not enough, there’s a lot of pessimism about whether we can achieve what the American, Indian and Irish software developers can achieve. Suffice it to say that with my boss Hajo Birthelmer guiding us, and even more importantly with God on our side, we’ll beat everyone’s expectations.

So I now have to get comfortable with something called Spring (why does that give me the chills). Being a proponent for standards in enterprise Java, I thought Seam and Google Guice’s Web Beans JSR gave me enough motivation to stick with Seam as my preferred dependency injection-based framework.

Then to make it worse I also have to get comfortable with Eclipse. I’ve always had a bias against it and it SWT leanings, but because Spring support in Eclipse is quite advanced, i guess there’s no other choice. I might as well enjoy learnig and using them as I go along.

I’m already missing the folks on campus I used to teach and discuss Java and Linux technologies. Hope to spend sometime with some of them when they are on vacation. Like to say a few thanks though to Frank Appiah, Edwin Amoakwah, Appiah-Kubi, Nana Sawyer, Julius Kudjoe, Annan Sowah, Boamah Steven and Tolu Erinle. Keep up the hard work.

To my Seam friends, don’t worry we still have a long way to go yet. Keep your eyes on the ball.

To all the folks that turned up for my seminar on Seam, thanks for coming and I hope you enjoyed the session. Hope to do another seminar sometime soon and you’re definitely on my list.