J-Development

A while back we joined the JSF 2.3 EG as zeef.com. While we had contributed as individuals before (mostly via code suggestions and snippets in JIRA issues) we are proud that today our first more direct contribution was committed to Mojarra for the ongoing JSF 2.3 effort.

Co-spec lead Manfred Riem tweeted about this earlier today:

And the JCP process in action! Thank to Arjan Tijms for his recent #JSF 2.3 contribution! Generic injection of the applicationMap. Enjoy!

— Manfred Riem (@mnriem) January 27, 2015

The commit in question can be seen in our GitHub mirror. To summarize the change; before it was only possible to inject the application map as follows:

@Inject
@ApplicationMap
Map applicationMap;

As can be seen, the map is missing its generic parameters. This is of course far from ideal. With the latest patch, this map can now be injected as it should be:

@Inject
@ApplicationMap
Map<String, Object> applicationMap;

Injection into a raw map is still supported, but for most cases the generic variant should be preferred.

It’s a fairly small change, but hopefully many more of such changes will follow soon 😉

Arjan Tijms

Currently development for JSF 2.3 is well underway in the trunk of the Mojarra project.

The Mojarra project still uses SVN, and only has the default web interface up and running. Specifically this means it’s not entirely easy to browse through the commits and see diffs, as this default web interface only offers a very bare bones browsing of the repository.

While there are of course web tools for SVN that show commits and diffs etc, simply importing the SVN repository into GitHub proved to be the easiest solution. So therefor we made a mirror available on GitHub:

github.com/javaeekickoff/mojarra

This mirror is automatically updated every half an hour, so it should never be that far behind the SVN root repository. GitHub provides a number of extra features, such as feeds in atom format. Using that we can easily create widgets such as the one below that shows a near real-time overview of the 3 latest commits:

In addition to this mirror we’ve also published a fork of it, in which we made a few small changes that allows the Mojarra project to be used from Eclipse. This fork is at:

github.com/omnifaces/mojarra

This fork will function as OmniFaces’ feature branch for code that we hope will be integrated into Mojarra and thus JSF 2.3 (which is of course subject to approval by the JSF spec leads and the other EG members).

For completeness, once checked-out, Mojarra can be build using the following steps:

Assuming SOURCE_HOME is the directory containing the source code:

1. Copy build.properties.glassfish to build.properties
2. Edit build.properties and set jsf.build.home to SOURCE_HOME
3. Make sure JAVA_HOME is set and points to a JDK8 install
   e.g. on Ubuntu put JAVA_HOME=/opt/jdk8 in /etc/environment

4. From SOURCE_HOME run (on the commandline) ant main clean main

The jsf-api.jar will be in SOURCE_HOME/jsf-api/build/lib and jsf-impl.jar will be in SOURCE_HOME/jsf-ri/build/lib.

When making changes from within Eclipse (use the OmniFaces fork for that):

1. Make changes as needed in .java files, but note that the Eclipse compiled result in SOURCE_HOME/bin must be ignored
2. From SOURCE_HOME run (on the command line) ant clean main

The jsf-api.jar will again be in SOURCE_HOME/jsf-api/build/lib and jsf-impl.jar will be in SOURCE_HOME/jsf-ri/build/lib.

Do note that the initial build command is ant main clean main, but all following builds happen via the command ant clean main. This is due to a circular dependency, that will likely be removed in the (near) feature if/when the entire project becomes a Maven project. Also note that when that happens, the Eclipse specific changes in the OmniFaces fork of Mojarra will not be needed anymore either.

Arjan Tijms

Two days back I noticed Eclipse had a mysterious update available; Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers, version 4.4.1.20150109-0740 with id “epp.package.jee”:

Of course there was no info on what this update was about and Googling for it yielded no results. Googling again for it today gave a single hit:

download.eclipse.org/technology/epp/packages/luna/SR1a/p2.diff.txt

Looking at the URL revealed that “4.4.1.20150109-0740” is the alternative universe version for what’s otherwise known as “Luna SR1a”. Googling for the latter gave some more results, particularly the following one:

Eclipse Ships Luna SR1a Git Security Release

A bit out of character, but the Eclipse organization even linked to this from their homepage!

Why it’s so difficult for Eclipse to show a description for their updates is still a small mystery, but at least the mystery of what “4.4.1.20150109-0740” is about is now solved 😉

Arjan Tijms