Proof of concept J2EE

This week I'm going to do a Proof of Concept with the following technologies:

• Java server Faces: Standard for building User interfaces for Java web applications.


• J2SE 5.0Newest Java Virtual Machine


• HibernateFor persistence, hibernate with annotations will be used

The functionality built is the following: Create an web module to manage the roles, users and user-role associations. It will also integrate into Apache Tomcats' JDBC Realm (maybe a customized one).

For my job I've made custom tag libraries, which handle data binding to Beans. I'm curious if JSF can do things as nice as this taglib can :).

Existing JavaScript frameworks

On the Internet, I haven't seen many usable JavaScript frameworks until now. There are very much usable sites (such as Quirksmode), that figure out browser differences for JavaScript, but mostly it's just a short script per problem;I haven't seen this structured in a framework.

For my customers I have written different JavaScript utility classes that help the programmer to focus on business logic. Some key features of these scripts:

• Resolution detection


• Flash detection (detect if Flash version x is available)


• Event management: register multiple events for the event types onload, onresize, onmousemove


• Simplifies integration of FCK editor in forms


• Integration with Taconit (Ajax framework)


• Get very much info about the screen (resolution, window size, document size)

All things are implemented straightforward; it implements technical features many JavaScript writers need.

I'm thinking about it, to publish this collection of scripts as open source on Sourceforge.

To make sure, I'm not going to re invite the wheel, I've done some research to some existing frameworks. I found the following:

• Prototype


• Mochikit


• IE7

Do you think many people need another JavaScript framework?

Ajax usage

Have you already used Ajax in customers projects?

I've used it for the back end from one of my customers' websites.

For this project I've used Taconite , a lightweight Ajax framework. Starting with Ajax is not too hard when using this framework. It handles the basic stuff: encapsulates browser differences, and handles the technical stuff. The browsers' DOM is used to traverse through the response XML and to insert it into the document. It provides insertion of dynamic content to the page: before / after a node, inside a node or by replacing a node.

For my back end, Ajax is used for flow control and form validation. It works fine, and will save me lots of time on my next projects.

I found some issues with Internet Explorers' DOM support:

• For TEXTAREA nodes, new lines are ignored by default


• For SELECT nodes, multiple attribute is skipped

I've made fixes for these bugs. I've given them back to the Taconite community; however, no release with these issues fixed, has been made yet (some issues aren't yet in CVS). Click here to get Taconite with these problems fixed.

Plenty of Ajax frameworks have been released already. Have you been using Ajax already? Should we keep it lightweight, or should it support more stuff such as XUL, like this one does?

Welcome to this blog

This blog is to share my knowledge with the world, discuss newest developments about web development, and about tools that make life easier.

Introducing myself

I'm a software engineer at MP Objects. MP Objects creates software for Supply Chain Systems. Currently I work on large scaled J2EE projects with Open Source components, such as JBoss, Eclipse and XDoclet.

I'm owner of a small company which does some web development for small companies.

Contents of this blog

- Discuss newest (web) technologies
- Discuss what's wrong with current (web) technologies
- Discuss useful tools / utilities that improve productivity of computers users

Happy reading / commenting!