Sunday, March 07, 2004

XForms, Java Server Faces, InfoPath and BPEL I thought Jonas Jacobi of Oracle's JavaServer Faces team had started and stopped his blog as the version I was looking at only had two entries.  I ran into him the other night and harassed him a little (not having much of a leg to stand on given my February output!) and found out he had moved his blog to Orablogs and has been blogging nearly daily since the move.  Those thinking about JSF should add it to their must read list.  Added to my Oracle blog list - check it out - http://www.orablogs.com/jjacobi.  There seems like there should be an interesting intersection that bears exploration between JSF and XForms from a schema centric XML forms perspective: XForms, XML schema centric forms standard.  BT B, Oracle has been doing some work with XForms in our wireless technology that bears exploration - a bunch of examples are here on OTN. JSF - clearly aimed at easing the user interface development of J2EE developers.  There seems like there should be a very complimentary story to tell between XForms and JSF but I haven't seen knowledgable folks from both camps tell one yet. Microsoft has embarked down this path schema centric forms development in a big way with  Infopath which is based on the same ideas as XForms though productized and now embedded in much of Microsoft's client technology.  See this comparison between XForms and Infopath.   They set the bar on this integration last week with a launch announcement of the pending production release of Biztalk 2004. Why does a guy thinking about BPEL care about this?  Well, one of the missing links in the BPEL specification is the link to human interaction which consists of many different things (users and roles for instance) that will either need to be added to BPEL or to a complimentary product/specification.  One key feature of such support will be how to provide highly user friendly, interactive user interfaces for the schema bound documents that feed into and out of BPEL scenarios.   comment [] 8:10:46 PM

Eclipse, Lomboz and OC4J Last night I gave a crack at building a tutorial on using Eclipse, Lomboz and OC4J together. I was quite impressed ... rather than trying to mask the complexity of the underlying task, they tried to make the common tasks and activities that are there by the very nature of J2EE easy and straightforward. It had some rough edges ... that is why I am writing up the tutorial to save other folks a bit of pain ... hopefully by end of this coming week I will be done. Simple example: when you are building, assembling and packaging J2EE applications many developers think in terms of JARs, WARs and EARs. This isn't an after thought, it is fundamentally how you work with your application. Not doing it this way can be confusing to J2EE folks. Lomboz does it exactly that way - from the start you are thinking in that context. Folks new to J2EE or unfamiliar may find this strange but it as soon as they pick up a book on J2EE, build their first real J2EE application or start maintaining an existing one, it will likely become pretty clear. Here's a quick Eclipse/Lomboz screen shot of the launch tool where you can choose different J2EE artifacts to build. comment [] 12:20:42 AM