JSF Summit

Presentation at LaidOffCamp Miami

Denise Jacobs — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 16:00:14 CDT

LOL! Thanks friends. It was not a pleasant interaction. It turns out, I have an extra day in New...

Molly Holzschlag — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 13:00:19 CDT

LOL! Thanks friends. It was not a pleasant interaction. It turns out, I have an extra day in New Jersey and a non-stop flight to Omaha tmw.

Run this through Google Translate if you need to: http://gihyo.jp/dev/feature/01/devtools/0004 - the...

Molly Holzschlag — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 11:00:15 CDT

Run this through Google Translate if you need to: http://gihyo.jp/dev/feature/01/devtools/0004 - the dev tool comparison is interesting.

The Look

Sean Kane — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 08:00:16 CDT

I’m not sure if you can get much more sassy than this.

OAuth-ing Twitter with Twitter4J

Andrew Glover — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:00:12 CDT

Twitter turned off basic authentication. Finally. Henceforth, you can’t log into Twitter via its API in the traditional sense; accordingly, the following code, which uses Twitter4J isn’t valid any longer:

Twitter twitter =
    new TwitterFactory().getInstance("some user", "some password");

If you try that these days, you should see a nasty JSON message as a response stating along the lines of {"code":53, "message":"Basic authentication is not supported"}.

Instead, Twitter now requires OAuth for authenticating requests, which isn’t so bad; however, if you intend to use Twitter4J, things get complicated quickly namely because the current examples listed don’t actually work. Because it’s my bag, I aim to set the record straight though.

OAuth isn’t terribly complicated; nevertheless, if you read the various documents related to it, you’ll most likely end up confused. There are various forms of OAuth and things are different depending on desktop or mobile or web applications. In short, however, OAuth basically means two things:

applications don’t need to store a login and password
apps now delegate authorization to a trusted location — i.e. twitter

It’s all done with various tokens that are traded. Accordingly, the first step to get working with OAuth for web applications is to register your application with Twitter. You’ll need to provide a few pieces of information — key is a callback URL, which can be changed at runtime.

You’ll be given a few datums in return: namely a consumer key and a consumer secret. You’ll need those to get things started. Obviously, don’t share the secret.

Next, you’ll do two things — ask the user to sign into Twitter (in this step you’ll send some information to Twitter) and then when the user grants you permission, Twitter will invoke your callback URL. At this endpoint, you’ll need to grab another token. Then you’ll have the credentials to act upon a user’s behalf going forward.

I’m going to demonstrate this with a simple web application written with The Play Framework, which is a nifty Java based framework similar in ways to something like Rails or Grails. One thing I particularly like about Play is its ability to get a web application up and running without a domain model. This is distinctly different than Grails, which is definitely a fancy, rapid web application development framework, but which stresses a model first. Play seems to stress controllers upfront with less emphasis on domains. Thus, with Play, I can quickly demonstrate a two step OAuth flow without having to worry about a model.

As Play is a Java framework (it does leverage Groovy under the covers in some places), you end up writing everything in Java. Endpoints are written in classes that extend Play’s Controller type and are methods that begin with public static void. Thus, my first endpoint is dubbed login, which is invoked after a user clicks a link asking them to log into Twitter:

public static void login() {
 Twitter twitter =
     new TwitterFactory().getOAuthAuthorizedInstance("r4...w", "j4...2");

  try {
    RequestToken requestToken = twitter.getOAuthRequestToken(
           "http://localhost:9000/application/callback");

    session.put("requestToken_token", requestToken.getToken());
    session.put("requestToken_secret", requestToken.getTokenSecret());
    redirect(requestToken.getAuthorizationURL());
   } catch (Exception e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
   }
}

As you can see above, a TwitterFactory instance is created with my consumer key and secret. Then, a RequestToken instance is obtained and in doing so, I pass in my own callback URL (http://localhost:9000/application/callback), which Twitter will invoke after a person grants access. Lastly, two pieces of information is placed into Play’s session object, which isn’t a typical Servlet Session, but really a cookie. Those two pieces of information will be required when things get transferred back to your web application. Lastly, the browser is then redirected to an authorization URL on Twitter’s website.

The callback URL invokes the following endpoint:

public static void callback(String oauth_token, String oauth_verifier) {

 Twitter twitter =
    new TwitterFactory().getOAuthAuthorizedInstance("90...2", "3ee..");
 AccessToken accTok = null;
 try {
    accTok = twitter.getOAuthAccessToken(
    session.get("requestToken_token"),
    session.get("requestToken_secret"), oauth_verifier);
 } catch (Exception e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
 }
 //... do twitter stuff....
}

Play endpoints can have parameters, which incoming HTTP parameters are bound to via name — as you can see, Twitter passes back two parameters: oauth_token & oauth_verifier. Accordingly, I only need one — the oauth_verifier, which is used in concert with the two tokens held in a cookie to obtain an AccessToken instance.

Going forward for the remainder of this session, my twitter instance is authorized — I can do things on behalf of the user who granted my application access to their account (such as update status, etc). If I chose to do things on their behalf in the future, I can reuse the required tokens. All I need to do is save the oauth_verifier for this user or the AccessToken itself, etc.

Now that you’re familiar with OAuth and Twitter4J’s APIs, go forth and build Twitter applications, baby. Can you dig it?

Looking to spin up Continuous Integration quickly? Check out www.ciinabox.com.

Exadel Tiggr, and beautiful RichFaces application

Max Katz — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 13:00:13 CDT

Links for 2010-09-07:

Exadel Tiggr gets another mention at Top 21 blog
Check out this beautiful application built with RichFaces

once again, I’m on the wrong side of time. Maybe that’s what keeps me acting like a four...

Molly Holzschlag — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 11:00:44 CDT

once again, I’m on the wrong side of time. Maybe that’s what keeps me acting like a four year old?

If people need God, they should have God. If people don’t want a god, they should not want...

Molly Holzschlag — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 08:00:16 CDT

If people need God, they should have God. If people don’t want a god, they should not want one. For fuck’s sake why the fuss?

Open source business intelligence

Andrew Glover — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 16:00:15 CDT

I recently caught up with Tim Berglund and had a hip conversation with him regarding open source business intelligence. Tim points out that business intelligence tools have traditionally been a high-cost part of any enterprise’s software inventory (involving lots of golf and armies of consultants); however, options have emerged that allow teams to build credible business intelligence stacks out of entirely open-source components. In this podcast, Tim talks about various tools for ETL, reporting, and analytics like Pentaho and Talend — I really enjoyed our conversation as I definitely learned a few things!

Looking to spin up Continuous Integration quickly? Check out www.ciinabox.com.

Mastering Node

Mike Girouard — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 13:00:17 CDT

@codepo8 was kind enough to share a link to Mastering Node, an open source eBook on NodeJS.

It’s still a work in progress, but it’s the most complete I’ve seen so far. There’s no formal table of contents, but if you peek at the Makefile, you can get a clear idea on the topics covered so far:

Installing Node
CommonJS Module System
Globals
Events
Buffers
Streams
File System
TCP
HTTP
Connect
Express
Testing
Deployment

The easiest thing to to is to clone the repo and build the book (htmldoc req’d) that way you always have the latest and greatest. If you’re lazy, just browse the repo’s .md files or download the PDF that is already built.

via Mastering Node and @codepo8

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Story of my life…

Mike Girouard — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 11:00:15 CDT

via Toothpaste For Dinner – ARCHIVE: Aug 2010.

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The Agile Guerilla Series

Matt Stine — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 08:00:16 CDT

I recently completed a series of articles for Agile Zone entitled “The Agile Guerilla.” Those of you that have seen me on the No Fluff Just Stuff tour this year may recognize a talk by the same name. They are one and the same concept: my attempt to reach the masses with strategies for introducing change, specifically moving to agility, into organizations from the grassroots level.

Here’s a list of the complete set of articles for your convenience!

First place [Flickr]

Aaron Gustafson — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 16:00:12 CDT

Aaron Gustafson posted a photo:

[Flickr]

Aaron Gustafson — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 13:00:13 CDT

Aaron Gustafson posted a photo:

What has Maven ever done for us?

John Smart — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 11:00:22 CDT

Notes from the People's Popular Anti-Maven Front of Java General Meeting

REG: All these years. Maven has bled us dry with convoluted XML files, forced us to respect the Maven way, and made us download the internet at every build. And what has Maven ever given us in return?!

JAVA COMMANDO #1: Standard directory structures?

REG: What?

JAVA COMMANDO #1: Standard directory structures.

REG: Oh. Yeah, yeah. It did give us that. Uh, that's true. Yeah.

JAVA COMMANDO #2: And common build targets across projects. Remember how hard it use to be with Ant, to figure out how to build a new project?

REG: Yeah. All right. I'll grant you, standard directory structures and common build targets are two things that Maven has done well.

JAVA COMMANDO #2: And Declarative Dependency Management.

REG: Yeah. Well, obviously, Declarative Dependency Management. I mean, Declarative Dependency Management goes without saying, doesn't it - everyone wants to do that now. But apart from Standard Directory Structures, common build targets, and Declarative Dependency Management--

JAVA COMMANDO #3: Common artifact naming conventions?

JAVA COMMANDO #1: Code quality reporting

JAVA COMMANDO #2: Yeah, Sonar

REG: Yeah, yeah. All right. Fair enough.

JAVA COMMANDO #4: Enterprise Repositories?

JAVA COMMANDO #2: Yeah, you can actually publish your JAR files without using email, now. They're the ones who came up with that.

REG: All right, but apart from Standard Directory Structures, common build targets, and Declarative Dependency Management, a common artifact naming convention, code quality reporting, Sonar, Enterprise Repositories, what has Maven ever done for us?

JAVA COMMANDO #1: Groovy pom files?

REG: Oh. Shut up!

Check out the original version here.

Unofficial IRC channel for WebSphere eXtreme Scale

Billy Newport — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 08:00:16 CDT

I'm making an IRC channel on the IRC server ircnet.eversible.com called #ibmwxs

I'll be hanging there as often as I can and hopefully you to.

PrettyFaces 3.1.0 released: URL-rewriting for Servlet & JSF

Lincoln Baxter III — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 16:00:18 CDT

» Get PrettyFaces!

Features & Enhancements:

Introducing URL mapping configuration with annotations (tutorial + docs)
Added path and query-parameter validation wth managed bean methods (#50 + r353)
Added support for JSF2 redirects using ExternalContext (r305)
Added support for arrays as query parameters (r278)

Special thanks to Christian Kaltepoth for his incredible annotations configuration system, and for fixing more bugs than any other project member over the past 3 months!

Regression impact:

The URL query string is now included in rewrite-rules; this allows for finer control of the rewriting engine (Any prior rewrite rules should be revised and re-tested)
PrettyContext.getCurrentURL() has been replaced with PrettyContext.getRequestURL() and PrettyContext.getRequestQueryString()

Bugfixes:

Resolved Mojarra warning “Request path ‘/faces/url.xhtml’ begins with one or more occurrences of the FacesServlet prefix path mapping ‘/faces’.” when using path mapping (#43 + r379)
Resolved Deployment warning on Geronimo (#58 + r364)
URL Path Expressions now match correctly when more than one expression is used between path segments (r362)
Resolved ClassNotFoundException with JSF 1.2 on JBoss6 (#54 + r360)
Resolved failed deployment due to ClassNotFoundException on Geronimo (#59 + r369)

RichFaces 4.0 M2 is now available

Max Katz — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 13:00:19 CDT

RichFaces 4 is one more milestone closer to GA. This week JBoss and Exadel teams have released RichFaces 4 Milestone 2. This milestone includes:

New components: accordion, autocomplete, inplaceInput, and inputNumberSlider
Large scale stabilization to our core and CDK modules.
The RichFaces Showcase Demo now includes all the components
Support for cloud deployment is coming

For more details, head to this post by Jay Balunas. There is more information on Milestone 3 plans as well as final release.

If your team considering RichFaces 4, to get them up to speed faster, consider on-site RichFaces training or 1-day RichFaces 3 to 4 workshop.

Two other RichFaces events coming up:

Workshop: RichFaces 4 workshop at Herbstcampus in Nuremberg
Webinar: Ajax Applications with JSF 2 and the New RichFaces 4

Unofficial IRC channel for WebSphere eXtreme Scale

Billy Newport — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 11:00:15 CDT

I'm making an IRC channel on the IRC server ircnet.eversible.com called #ibmwxs

I'll be hanging there as often as I can and hopefully you to.

9 Useful PHP Functions and Features You Need to Know

Mike Girouard — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 08:00:15 CDT

Nettuts+ a good one today: 9 Useful PHP Functions and Features You Need to Know.

A few good ones are on there which I didn’t know about like glob(), scandir(), gzcompress()/gzuncompress() and I’m surprised that I never knew about register_shutdown_function().

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