Another Oracle Donation to Open Source

This is exciting news web developers who believe in J2EE, so buckle up!

I am pleased to announce that Oracle is contributing a rich set of UI components based on the JavaServer Faces specification to the Apache Software Foundation under the Apache 2.0 license. The donation was originally part of Oracle ADF. What it will be called in the future is yet to be determined by the Apache MyFaces community.

What's in it for Oracle?
We like to get behind technologies we believe in. We think JSF holds great promise and Apache MyFaces is a great JSR-127 implementation. By supporting JSF and MyFaces we are hoping that more vendors are going to join us and strengthen the Faces community.

Why should I care?
I would say wait till you try it. This is going to give a big boost to the JavaServer Faces technology as well as the MyFaces project. The donated code comes with great functionality out of the box. How would you like to have high quality capabilities such as: file upload support, client-side validation, partial rendering of a page (AJAX-style), data tables, hierarchical tables, color/date pickers, progress indicators, menu tabs/buttons, internationalization and accessibility? This donation starts with more than 100 components which have already been thoroughly tested and come with high quality documentation.

How about tools?
Oracle developers are also leading the Eclipse JSF tooling project, we are going to make sure that this plug-in works well with MyFaces and its components to help J2EE developers develop and deploy great looking web applications using open source technology donated by Oracle.

After several months of effort, I'm very excited to see this donation go forward. We know that our donation is being placed in very good hands, and we look forward to seeing more components "blossom" as part of the Apache MyFaces project.

I'm Back!

I would like to apologize to my readers for being so quiet for the last couple of months. I've been too busy and on the road quite a bit. I had a chance to speak at the Gartner Open Source Summit in Florida as well as ApacheCon in San Diego. I hope you like the news in my next blog entry!