Last night was the monthly Boston Websphere Users Group (strangely called WBUG) and we were lucky enough to hear from Beverly DeWitt who is one of the product managers for the Websphere Studio product. Most people seemed to be there to hear about JSF and also get a sneak peak at the latest from Websphere studio.
It was great to get a bit of a look into how Websphere Studio is developed. Management seems to come mainly out of the Rational Office in (near?) Boston and development done worlwide (EU?). The build Beverly was using was fresh off the press from Sunday. It was strangely comforting to know that even a project as major was WSAD doesn't have perfect builds, but there was nothing major. The release we were looking at was WSAD 5.1.2. A release that seems to be still being prepared and hasn't officially been announced yet. I asked one question during the night, "What Eclipse build is it based on?". Sadly still Eclipse 2.1, but I guess that is to be expected seeing as Eclipse 3 have only just stabalised their public APIs (no more excuses for Subclipse not to implement a Sync view)
The focus began on the latest RAD tooling aspects of WSAD. We saw a demonstration of a web page being created from a template , the a data set being connected up to form a displayable table. The best bit was the drag and drop pagination component which many different styles for navigation and list size thresholds. This was all very fancy, but someone said what we all were thinking, "Can we see the code please?". I guess that must be a bit dissapointing for a product manager of RAD tooling, but I've really never seen RAD tooling to be very effective past developing a quick prototype. So after a room full of WSAD users fumbling about trying to get the font big enough to read (someone pulled out the ol "how many programmers does it take to change a font" joke), the code looked ok.
Not knowing much about JSF (but I now want to know more), we were shown how buttons and links were driving Java code using this event driven "code behind" idea. There were promises of JSF handling all your session state management problems with less manual coding that usual (I'd like to believe that, but I need to try it myself). We also saw some rich client (ie. crazy Javascript which does apparently support a good range of browsers, except Safari which made me VERY happy indeed) JSF components such as rich text editors and tree structures that interacted with client side data.
This release also contains some of the 4GL language aspects that usually come with the WSED offering, but these don't really interest my anyway. Sorry.
We didn't really get into any technical aspects of JSF, but it was good to see IBM behind it and I will definitely be "checking out the code" very soon.
Posted by dbradby at May 1, 2004 02:30 AM