Welcome to Rotowatch

This is my first post.    I’ve read so many times over the last year in different people’s blogs  (Jeremy Zawodny for one) how one of the things that they look for when interviewing a Software Engineer is whether they maintain a blog.    I don’t think it’s a particularly good litmus test for hiring, but I think a blog is probably as good - or better - than keeping a work journal.

I’ve decided to use Wordpress for my blog, and Flock to edit posts.   I really am starting to like using the Flock Blog Editor, although I’m a little bummed it doesn’t just let me put an anchor tag in - I need to use the UI to enter a link.   It’d also be cool if it supported hot keys (for bolding, italics, etc.) but it doesn’t seem to do that.      The Wordpress admin editor seems kind of clunky to the Flock editor. 

Anyway, here’s the start of my blogging - we had a team meeting today discussing future architecture of our product.   We’ve been heading down the road of using JSF because of our need for custom components.     We’re also moving towards replacing Castor JDO with Hibernate, mainly because of limitations in OQL.    I’ve been tasked with investigating what kinds of frameworks or integration code we can use with JSF.

JSF is pretty new, so there’s not much out there.    Shale looks like it is really the only option at the moment, but there also seems to be some Spring/JSF integration out there.     I know right off the bat that we’ll be interested in the Shale Validators since the JSF validators are pretty weak.     I’m going to need to play around with Clay (the reusable views) to understand what it’s capable of, and I was a little disappointed that there’s not much documentation for the Remoting part.

Struts-Faces is out there too and it looks like another option, but it doesn’t look like it does anything other than replace Struts tags with JSF components.

More later when I start trying to integrate things in.

technorati tags: shale, jsf, java