Arjan Tijms' Weblog

One of the new specs that will debut in Java EE 8 will be MVC 1.0, a second MVC framework alongside the existing MVC framework JSF. A lot has been written about this. Discussions have mostly been about the why , whether it isn't introduced too late in the game, and what the advantages (if any) above JSF exactly are. Among the advantages that were initially mentioned were the ability to have different templating engines, have better performance and the ability to be stateless. Discussions have furthermore also been about the name of this new framework. This name can be somewhat confusing. Namely, the term MVC to contrast with JSF is perhaps technically not entirely accurate, as both are MVC frameworks. The flavor of MVC intended to be implemented by MVC 1.0 is actually "action-based MVC", most well known among Java developers as "MVC the way Spring MVC implements it". The flavor of MVC that JSF implements is "Component-based MVC". Alternative term...

After a poll regarding the future dependencies of OmniFaces 2.0 and two release candidates we're proud to announce that today we've finally released OmniFaces 2.0. OmniFaces 2.0 is a direct continuation of OmniFaces 1.x, but has started to build on newer dependencies. We also took the opportunity to do a little refactoring here and there (specifically noticeable in the Events class). The easiest way to use OmniFaces is via Maven by adding the following to pom.xml: <dependency> <groupId>org.omnifaces</groupId> <artifactId>omnifaces</artifactId> <version>2.0</version> </dependency> A detailed description of the biggest items of this release can be found on the blog of BalusC . One particular new feature not mentioned there is a new capability that has been added to <o:validateBean> ; class level bean validation. While JSF core and OmniFaces both have had a validateBean for some time, one thing it c...

After an intense debugging session following the release of OmniFaces 2.0, we have decided to release one more release candidate; OmniFaces 2.0 RC2. For RC2 we mostly focused on TomEE 2.0 compatibility. Even though TomEE 2.0 is only available in a SNAPSHOT release, we're happy to see that it passed almost all of our tests and was able to run our showcase application just fine. The only place where it failed was with the viewParamValidationFailed page, but this appeared to be an issue in MyFaces and unrelated to TomEE itself. To repeat from the RC1 announcement: OmniFaces 2.0 is the first release that will depend on JSF 2.2 and CDI 1.1 from Java EE 7. Our Servlet dependency is now Servlet 3.0 from Java EE 6 (used to be 2.5, although we optionally used 3.0 features before). The minimal Java SE version is now Java 7. A full list of what's new and changed is available here . OmniFaces 2.0 RC2 can be tested by adding the following dependency to your pom.xml: <depende...

Authentication is a topic that comes up often for web applications. The Java EE spec supports authentication for those via the Servlet and JASPIC specs, but doesn't say too much about how to authenticate for JAX-RS. Luckily JAX-RS is simply layered on top of Servlets, and one can therefore just use JASPIC's authentication modules for the Servlet Container Profile. There's thus not really a need for a separate REST profile, as there is for SOAP web services. While using the same basic technologies as authentication modules for web applications, the requirements for modules that are to be used for JAX-RS are a bit different. JAX-RS is often used to implement an API that is used by scripts. Such scripts typically do not engage into an authentication dialog with the server, i.e. it's rare for an API to redirect to a form asking for credentials, let alone asking to log-in with a social provider. An even more fundamental difference is that in web apps it's common...

We are happy to announce that we have just released OmniFaces 2.0 release candidate 1. OmniFaces 2.0 is the first release that will depend on JSF 2.2 and CDI 1.1 from Java EE 7. Our Servlet dependency is now Servlet 3.0 from Java EE 6 (used to be 2.5, although we optionally used 3.0 features before). The minimal Java SE version is now Java 7. A full list of what's new and changed is available here . OmniFaces 2.0 RC1 can be tested by adding the following dependency to your pom.xml: <dependency> <groupId>org.omnifaces</groupId> <artifactId>omnifaces</artifactId> <version>2.0-RC1</version> </dependency> Alternatively the jars files can be downloaded directly . If no major bugs surface we hope to release OmniFaces 2.0 final in about one week from now. Arjan Tijms