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(My replacement DSL modem arrived from Speakeasy today. And it worked. Hurray!)

Tonight's St. Louis JUG meeting is again a very interesting one. Jay Meyer from Harpoon Technologies talked about Java Server Faces.

In stark contrast with the last JSF talk at the JUG 300 days ago, Jay's presentation is done from a Java web developers point of view. Having been to one too many JSF talks where the speaker can't seem to be able to extricate themselves from the JSF architecture diagrams for the first 30 minutes, Jay's straightforward approach of showing sample codes and talking very frankly about the advantages and shortcomings of JSF resonated with most of the over 40 Java developers in attendance. The interchange between the speaker and the audience members are very animated. Many good points were voiced by both the speaker and the audiences.

I will post a link the the presentation material as soon as it is uploaded to the JUG web site. However, my take away from this talk is this—Use Facelets, MyFaces, Seam, EJB3.

[Update] The presentation slides are here. Be sure to take a look at it. It's a fun one.

Other tidbits from the JUG:

In the Q&A session, I asked if anyone is using Maven. Only one or two people raised their hands. Raj Patel explained how he tried Maven and didn't feel comfortable about the extra things that Maven is doing to the project. Of the people who used Maven one asked "voluntarily?" On the other hand, when I asked about Ant, almost everyone raised their hands.

Someone asked the question about unit testing private methods. A long discussion ensued with Jeff Grigg suggesting that if you feel the need to test that particular private method then perhaps that method belongs to another class as a public method. I did not get a chance to say it, but my feeling is that private methods should be only unit tested through public interfaces.

Everybody is still looking for strong Java developers. For job opportunities at OCI see our careers page.

Oh, have I mentioned that I'm using Google Toolbar now. Its spell checking feature fits my way of blogging just right—now I can just click on the and do it in the editing text area.