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I am working on a web site that will help students practice their Scala programming skills. As I labored along, writing my JSF app code, I thought "this is silly-why not practice Scala at the same time?" But I like JSF and wasn't ready to jump to Lift or Vaadin. With Eclipse, this isn't all that hard. Install the Java plugin. Make a dynamic web project in the usual way, using the Java EE perspective. Then, switch to the Scala perspective, right-click on the project, and, if all planets are aligned correctly, you will get a menu item "Add Scala nature". (If they are not, see here for a manual approach.) Add your managed beans as Scala classes. Finally, switch back to the Java EE perspective, select the project properties, and add the Scala library JAR as a Java EE module dependency. But I like NetBeans and wasn't ready to switch to Eclipse. (Unfortunately, JSF 2 support in Eclipse is pretty minimal, the Glassfish integration is a bit flaky, and the Scala plugin has very little usable code completion.) NetBeans doesn't let me add a "Scala nature" to a web project. If I add Scala files to the project, I can edit them with the Scala editor, but they just get copied to the WAR file, without any compilation. I had one look at the Ant scripts for a Scala and a web project and decided that I wasn't going to figure out how to merge them. This blog shows how you can use Maven to make a mixed Scala/Java project in NetBeans. So I gathered up JSF and Scala pom.xml files from here and here, cut out the considerable crud from the JSF POM file that was probably meant for supporting Tomcat, and merged the results to the best of my ability-see below. You use the usual Maven directory structure, but with a src/main/scala directory instead of src/main/java:

JSF 2.0, CDI, Scala 2.8 using Eclipse, Maven and Tomcat Tools used: * JDK 1.6 * Maven 2.2.1 * Eclipse 3.5 * Eclipse Scala plugin (I am using nightly build - http://www.scala-lang.org/scala-eclipse-plugin-nightly) * m2eclipse plugin Download the source from here

Vaadin is a Rapid Application Development (RAD) framework for RIA applications. I only know it for a few months but since I started experimenting with it, I'm really in favor of it. I see a lot of advantages compared to Sun's Java EE standard front-end framework JSF. First of all Vaadin is a java library, so you only have to write Java to build a complete frontend. No need for a specific frontend language, no need for converters (for comboboxes),… This also implies that you can use the full Java power on the frontend side and that's an huge advantage because frontend code is now type-safe and easily refactorable. You can unit test your frontend with JUnit. You can also use all existing java libraries on the frontend side, for example LOG4J. Another advantage is the fact that Vaadin is easy to learn (JSF isn't!) and to use: it's straigtforward. It feels like developing desktop apps and for me developing desktop apps feels much more intuitive than developing web-apps the way I'm used to. Vaadin uses convention over configuration. No need to register new components, validators or whatever in different xml files. Themes have a default folder and a default folder structure. Vaadin is very well documented. There's the book of Vaadin wich explains every aspect of the framework very clear. On the site there's a blog, a FAQ section, a wiki, a forum, examples with Java source code, … It's very easy to extend. Want to create your own Validator? Just implement an interface or extend another Validator and use it. Want to create your own custom server side component? Just extend the CustomComponent class or extend from another component. There's also an add-on directory where you can download UI components, data components, tools, themes, …

"I encourage (actually I dare you) to those who have never even touched a portal to take the JBoss Portlet Bridge for a test drive. It takes 1 download (GateIn bundled with JBoss) and one maven archetype to get started. You can choose from any combination of plain JSF, Richfaces, and Seam with mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeCatalog=http://bit.ly/jbossportletbridge from the command line."

"We'll be covering all aspects of mobile application development! This includes the latest HTML5 technologies used in the mobile web, and in hybrid application frameworks like the Apache Cordova. All the way to JBoss AS based services, mobile RichFaces/JSF2, tooling, and native application support, and prototyping. "

Last weekend while pondering the question "Is Scala ready for the enterprise?" I decided to write a simple Java EE 6 app entirely in Scala, without using any Java. I had three main reasons for doing this: one was just to see how easy/difficult it would be to write everything in Scala (it was easy).  Another was to document the process for others journeying down the same road (the entire project is on github).  Finally, I wanted to identify advantages of using Scala instead of Java that are specific to Java EE apps (I found several). Background The specific app I created was an adaptation of the Books example from Chapter 10 of Beginning Java™ EE 6 Platform with GlassFish™ 3. It's a simple web app that displays a list of books in a database and lets you add new books. Although it's a pretty trivial app, it does touch on several important Java EE 6 technologies: JPA 2.0, EJB 3.1 and JSF 2.0.