The Seam team has announced that the first candidate release, CR1, of JBoss Seam 2.1.0 is now available for download.

Seam is described as:

a powerful open source development platform for building rich Internet applications in Java. Seam integrates technologies such as Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), JavaServer Faces (JSF), Java Persistence (JPA), Enterprise Java Beans (EJB 3.0) and Business Process Management (BPM) into a unified full-stack solution, complete with sophisticated tooling.

Version 2.1.0 of Seam provides several new features, most notably:

• Support for the Wicket web framework


• Flexible identity and permissions management


• Support for generating reports to CSV and Excel file formats


• Support for the Java REST api (JSR 311)

Technorati tags: seam, jboss

JBoss have released the final Candidate Release of the JBoss Application Server (JBoss AS 5.0.0.CR2). The next release of JBoss AS 5 is expected to be the final (GA) release.

 

JBoss 5 is the next generation of the JBoss Application Server build on top of the new JBoss Microcontainer. The JBoss Microcontainer is a lightweight container for managing POJOs, their deployment, configuration and lifecycle. It is a standalone project that replaces the famous JBoss JMX Microkernel of the 3.x and 4.x JBoss series. The Microcontainer integrates nicely with the JBoss framework for Aspect Oriented Programming, JBoss AOP.

This Release Candidate has passed the Java EE 5 TCK and now fully supports all of the features required of a Java EE 5 application server, bringing it in line with other EE 5 compatible application servers such as GlassFish and WebLogic 10.

 

This version of the application server can be downloaded from JBoss.

Technorati tags: application server, jboss, Java EE, tck

Bruce Johnson, Engineering Manager for the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) has announced the availability of version 1.5 of GWT. 

 

In his release announcement he says:

 

"GWT 1.5 delivers what we think are an impressive number of improvements, about four hundred issues if you're counting."

 

The new features supported in version 1.5 include:

 

• Java 5 language support
• Enhanced JRE emulation classes (e.g. StringBuilder, TreeMap)
• Many performance enhancements (up to 10x in some cases)
• Better JavaScript interoperability
• New sample application demoing all the new widget features

 

"OpenCms 7 Development" by Dan Liliedahl is intended for Java developers who wish to extend and customize OpenCms via its Java APIs. The book takes a tutorial approach to customizing OpenCms starting off by describing the blog application that is developed throughout the course of the book. 

Content Management is one of the buzz words within the IT industry at the moment. Many different CMS systems are available which can be customized in different ways either via .NET code, Java code or some other programming languages. OpenCms 7 is developed in Java and can be completely customized using its Java and XML apis.The book starts by describing the skills necessary for OpenCms development which range from basic HTML skills through to Java skills and having an in depth knowledge of the programming model behind the OpenCms product. For this book, it is assumed that the reader has basic Java knowledge and some familiariity with OpenCms although not necessarily at the code level. To ensure the reader has sufficient knowledge of OpenCms, a brief introduction to the product is provided including details of the applications architecture and Virtual File system. 

After introducing OpenCms and the different levels of development and customization available, chapter 2 of the book describes how to set up an Eclipse based environment for editing JSP code and how WebDAV can be used for editing pages within an OpenCms enviroment. The author describes this in detail including intricacies that a newcomer to the product may not be aware of. The chapter concludes by detailing how to check OpenCms out of the CVS repository and how to build and debug it within Eclipse. 

After spending a fair amount of time with introductions, the author moves on to describe OpenCms modules describing what they are and how to create them within the OpemCms Module Management view. A blog entry content type is created for which the full XSD is listed within the book. After creating a content type, the reader is shown how to register this within OpenCms and how to create field mappings between the content type (XML Schema) and the fields within the blog application that are displayed on the page. Different widgets are described (for example the calendar and HTML editor widgets) along with the XML needed to allow them to be displayed on a form. This section contains a lot of XML and isn't for the feint hearted. 

The next chapter of the book continues to talk about user interface issues. In it, the author describes how to build templates for an OpenCms site. This section describes how templates are built (including sidebars, headers and footers) providing details of how the OpemCms Java tag library can be used in conjunction with JSTL and JavaBeans showing how templates for different page types can be built up. The author spends a good amount of time on this section providing code samples for each feature described. All of these code samples used throughout the book are also available on the publisher's web site. 

What's a web site without search? Well, chapter 5 details the Lucene search engine which is included as part of the OpenCms distribution. A discussion on Lucene and the Luke Visual Indexer tool follows which is very useful for readers not familiar with the product. Again, as is common throughout the rest of the book, both JSP and Java source code is provided throughout the chapter in this instance, whilst describing how to configure search screens and backend search code. 

The next few chapters of the book incrementally add new features to the blog application namely, user registration, comment support, RSS feeds and administration support. The tutorial style is continued throughout these chapters with each starting with a description of the topic at hand. The reader is then taken through the stages necessary to develop the features each one including Java and JSP source code. 

This is a good book that I'd recommend for developers who are working with OpenCms 7 however I would suggest that readers of the book be familiar with OpenCms before reading it as the concepts can be quite difficult for new users to grasp. Experience of Java web development is required to make full use of this book as is experience of XML. Further details of this book can be obtained from the Publisher's web site.

The JBoss Seam team have released the first beta of Seam verson 2.1.0. Issues due to be fixed in the coming versions of the software, before 2.1.0 is released, can be found in the product RoadMap.

The Seam team describe Seam as

"a powerful open source development platform for building rich Internet applications in Java. Seam integrates technologies such as Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), JavaServer Faces (JSF), Java Persistence (JPA), Enterprise Java Beans (EJB 3.0) and Business Process Management (BPM) into a unified full-stack solution, complete with sophisticated tooling."

This version of Seam contains many new features including:

• Wicket Support
• Identity and permissions management
• Excel and CSV report creation from Facelets tags
• URL Rewriting
• REST API support (JSR 311)

About.com JavaScript guru, Stephen Chapman has awarded Stoyan Stefanov's 'Object-Oriented JavaScript' book 4/5 stars in his latest review.

Describing it as "A book that demonstrates some of what JavaScript can really do", Chapman goes on to herald the book as "a must have for any serious JavaScript programmer."

Read about the book at: http://www.packtpub.com/object-oriented-javascript-applications-libraries/book

Max Andersen has announced the availability of JBoss Tools 3.0.0 Alpha 1.  This is the first non-daily release of JBoss Tools that works with Eclipse 3.4 - Ganymede.

 

In his announcement, Max states that there are many new features to be available in the 3.0 release of the software including:

 

 

• Graphical Seam pages.xml editor
• BIRT SUPPORT
• EL Variable substitution
• Dali support for Hibernate
• any many more features 

 

 

 

Packt is pleased to announce a new book on extreme Java application testing. Written by Tim Lavers and Lindsay Peters, Swing Extreme Testing is a practical guide to automated software testing for extreme Java programming using Swing GUIs.

Swing was developed to provide a more sophisticated set of GUI components than the earlier Abstract Window Toolkit. Swing is a widget toolkit for Java and it is part of Sun Microsystems' Java Foundation Classes (JFC) — an Application Programming Interface (API) for providing a graphical user interface (GUI) for Java programs.

This book will teach users how to automatically test user interfaces (Swing GUIs), the help system, internationalization, log files, spreadsheets, email, and web services, how to perform tests involving multiple JVMs, and a host of other things.

This book is a practical guide based on the authors’ daily experience developing and maintaining a cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence system. Every chapter comes up with real-life examples and the source code that comes with the book is full of useful (and well-tested) tools.

Swing developers who design and develop complex software for user interfaces will find this book useful. The book is out now and is available with Packt. For more information, please visit: http://www.packtpub.com/java-swing-extreme-testing/book

The MyFaces team has released version 1.0.9 of MyFaces Trinidad.

Trinidad is a JSF framework including a large, enterprise quality component library, supporting critical features such as accessibility (e.g. Section 508), right-to-left languages, client-side validation etc.

The release notes for version 1.0.9 show numerous bug fixes have been completed in this version along with several improvements and a new feature - support for the autocomplete attribute on input fields.

This latest version of Trinidad can be downloaded from http://myfaces.apache.org/trinidad/download.html

The Eclipse Foundation has released Ganymede, the latest annual release this time containing 23 Eclipse projects including the Eclipse IDE version 3.4.

This latest version of the annual Eclipse release contains many new features including:

• Equinox P2 - a system to make installations and updated to Eclipse easier
• JSDT - A new JavaScript editor
• Improved JavaScript support for the Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools, BIRT
• Graphical database query tools
• Improved support for Java EE 5
• SOA support

and many other features.

Further information, inclusing webinars and demos can be found on the project website .

This new release can be downloaded from the Eclipse web site .

Max Andersen has today announced the release of JBoss Tools 2.1.0.GA.

"JBoss Tools is a set of plugins that enhances and adds support in Eclipse for JBoss.org projects and related technologies such as JBoss AS, Hibernate, JPA, Seam, jBPM, JSF and more."

Since release 2.0, many changes have been made including performance improvements (e.g. approximately 30x speed improvement on Seam Tools startup), usability fixes and bug fixes. The complete change log can be found here.

This release is a drop in upgrade from previous versions, however all users are recommended to try this version.

The tools can be downloaded from SourceForge .