At the JBoss booth at JavaOne 2008, I spoke with RichFaces developer Alexander Smirnov (OGG, MP3.) Alexander is the founder of the Ajax4jsf project, which he started as a personal side effort. It grew out of his interest in JSF and was originally run as a stand alone, self-hosted project.
As he developed Ajax4jsf, Alexander began working with the MyFaces community, and started communicating more with the larger JSF community. He moved the project to SourceForge at the suggestion of RichFaces lead developer Sergey Smirnov (no relation.) Exadel began developing the RichFaces JSF components library and Alexander joined the project as a framework background developer.
At the time it moved to java.net, Ajax4jsf had grown more useful when integrated with the RichFaces component library. RichFaces, however, was still not open source. The combined projects came to the attention of JBoss, which contracted with Exadel to open source both projects as JBoss projects. These were recently combined into a single project under the RichFaces name, available through JBoss.org. (RichFaces is combined with the JBoss Tools Eclipse-based developer environment to make up the JBoss Developer Studio subscription offering.)
Current activity for the RichFaces project includes a focus on building RichFaces functionality within JBoss Portlet Bridge. JBoss Portlet Bridge implements JSR-301 to provide support for not only JSF running in a portal, but also Seam and RichFaces.
Joining forces with JBoss has brought significantly more usage, ten times or more in terms of downloads. In particular, Alexander says there is an obvious increase in forum questions and discussions. In terms of attracting contributors, there are currently very few code contributions from the community outside of Exadel and JBoss. Alexander and Sergey describe the development process for the RichFaces team as being structured with a well-oiled process, which creates a higher barrier of entry for people outside of the team. As early ways to bring in external contributors, there are current needs for testing, defining future requirements, and requesting features and enhancements.
For the future roadmap of RichFaces, Alexander says that the next step is toward semantic web technologies.
This afternoon I caught a few minutes with Ivelin Ivanov, a lead developer on the Mobicents project. Mobicents is the first certified open source platform for developing and deploying JSLEE applications.
This audiocast is available from the JBoss.org podcast channel, in OGG and MP3 formats.
What’s funny is, the instructions are shorter than the title of this post.
su -c "rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-2.noarch.rpm"
su -c "yum install java-1.6.0-openjdk"
Read more about how to use EPEL. Fedora EPEL is a community run project to bring Fedora packages to Enterprise Linux users when the package is not included by Red Hat in an Enterprise Linux release. Read more on the Fedora EPEL wiki pages, including links to package view (i386, x86_64, ppc) per EPEL version (4, 5 to correspond with Enterprise Linux versions.)
Upon arriving I was immediately struck by how large and professional this open community conference is. CommunityOne seems indicative of what Sun’s developer audience might expect. A nice balance of spoon fed and gourmet buffet. Aside from doing final polish on my Fedora community presentation, I went to Benjamin Mako Hill’s talk on free culture and freedomdefined.org.
Currently I’m sitting in Jono Bacon’s talk on Ubuntu, and it’s amazing the thematic matches. People who really get community, the value of working with upstream, and treating community in the right ways. I think that, aside from logos, I could take Jono’s talk and give it about Fedora. Well, all except the Chuck Norris images.
Weren’t we all skeptical when Sun announced their intent to open source Java? But we’ve watched along the way, as they chose a good free/libre/open source software license (the GPL), as they opened the code Sun has a copyright to, and as they have embraced (to varying degrees) the community efforts, such as GNU Classpath and IcedTea.
It should be apparent that Red Hat is looking to put its bread where the open source butter is spread, in the acquisition of middleware powerhouse JBoss. As can happen with an acquisition, that propelled Red Hat even further into the Java camp. Yet is has been several of the long-time Red Hat engineers who are also responsible for leading and coding on open source projects that enabled all this to happen (GNU Classpath, IcedTea, gcj, and all around Eclipse, to name a prominent few.) What may have started as hedging the bet that Sun would follow through, all of this work has resulted in a stronger relationship across Java camps.
In a fair article on the freeing of Java, “Java fully open-sourced ‘by end of year’“, ZDNet quotes Sun that this year is going to see the end of all the remaining unfreeable parts of the JRE. What you think about that has to be balanced with what you believe. And this time, I find I’m believing that Sun can and will do it in 2008.
See you next week at JavaOne and CommunityOne. I’ll be there, on Monday talking about Fedora (and OpenJDK), and the rest of the week in the pavilion at the JBoss booth.
Continuing with the audiocast series from JBoss World 2008, this is EJB3 lead developer Carlo de Wolf talking about EJB 3 for Java developers new to Enterprise JavaBeans. The audio is available in OGG Vorbis and MP3 formats. Slides from the presentation are available.
As an ongoing joint operation, this audiocast is the first that is fed into the JBoss.org podcast channel (ATOM feed.) This is fun, as it allows us to distribute not only a title and rich description, but a thumbnail image full of meaning:
This article is an explanation for why non-commercial use restrictions on free content are contrary to the goal of making it free in the first place. It brings the discussion more clearly into a realm that is understandable for creative people not familiar with what we’ve learned in the free software movements. Think of it like great science writing, able to explain a complicated concept to a layperson … yet still with lessons for the most experienced.
Fresh from Australia, via JBoss.org, this is nearly an hour-long presentation on Web Beans. As the specification lead and originator of the JSR, Gavin has a lot to say on the subject:
Gavin provides an exceptionally nice walk-through behind not just how Web Beans works, but why it works the way it does. He provides comparison to AOP features, and even demonstrates the recursive nature of Web Beans functionality being used to define Web Beans functionality. Meta-annotations are cool. Meta-meta-annotations are even cooler.
We’ve broken the talk into 3 easy-to-digest chunks:
Can’t be much clearer than a free book. Heiko W. Rupp’s publisher has released the book as a free PDF in German, with a small courtesy survey in front of the download. The book is also available from Amazon.de.
Starting with this “Introduction to Seam” by Pete Muir from the 2008 Jboss World in Orlando, JBoss.org and Dev Fu are presenting original audiocasts of technical presentations from various JBoss events and presentations.
The audiocast is available in MP3 and OGG Vorbis formats. You can follow along with Pete’s presentation slides. This introduction is intended for Java developers and anyone interested in learning more about what Seam is, how it got this way, and where it is going next
This audiocast is the first of many, to be released one or two a week as we get through the editing process. That should carry us right up to the Red Hat Summit, where we seek additional relevant and interesting developer audio content.
