CodingClues

Well, the following post does not cover a typical programming topic, but maybe even as a software engineer you might have to deal with (web) design from time to time. At least I did when developing a new website for a customer (http://heilmann-software.de).

While creating shiny and glossy effects seems to be a trivial task for the experts using Photoshop, I tried a lot until I got some good results with Gimp, the Open Source image editor.

My goal was to develop a “shiny table” effect from a screenshot that was rotated into the view. Below you can see an example (of the result, of course ;))

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For those of you who want to display a progress panel or a progress bar whenever some loading on your page is required, the JBoss Wiki contains a really good tip: RichFacesPleaseWaitBox.

This sample can be enhanced very easily to bring in some dynamic: within the rich:modalPanel, just use an animated gif, for instance from this cool page.

Recently I stumbled across a problem with the rich:modalPanel component of the JBoss RichFaces component library, which didn’t want to show the data of a backing been.

Let’s assume the following scenario:
You have a DataTable with several rows. Each row contains a “See details…” button. This button will popup a modal panel using rich:componentControl and the panel is populated with data of a backing bean. This backing bean is filled with actual data by clicking our “See details…” button using a4j:actionparam

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Usually, when you enter standard <!-- ... --> html comments in your XHTML definition for a Facelets view, these comments are rendered by Facelets, so they are included in the resulting HTML. Even EL contained in these comments is executed!

In most cases, this is not what you hope to see, because if you want to make real comments, you have to use the <ui:remove> tag, which is not really comfortable.

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Recently I visited Jazoon, an international conference for Java developers at Zurich, Switzerland.

Having heard a lot of interesting talks, I want to sum up my impressions and try to figure out some of the latest trends in the world of Java as well as interesting facts for software architects.

This is part 3 of my series of blog posts and deals with

Ajax Push

Having worked with ICEfaces (but suspended work for now due to a lot of bugs), I was curious to hear a talk of one of the guys of ICEfaces, Ted Goddard.

The topic was Ajax Push. Surely, Ajax is a buzzword of today and everybody wants to have some Ajax functionality in his application, maybe just to be cool.

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Recently I visited Jazoon, an international conference for Java developers at Zurich, Switzerland.

Having heard a lot of interesting talks, I want to sum up my impressions and try to figure out some of the latest trends in the world of Java as well as interesting facts for software architects.

This is part 2 of my series of blog posts and deals with

Google Web Toolkit

I visited two talks about the GWT.

As you probably know, Google Web Toolkit follows the idea that the presentation layer of a web application can be entirely written in plain Java.
Mainly, the GWT is a compiler that compiles your Java code into highly optimized JavaScript, that is executed on the client side.

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