Freitag, 28. Mai 2010

Blogging about ICEfaces

One of my favorite software development frameworks - ICEsoft's ICEfaces started a blogging contest (one of the prices is an iPad - nice since my fiancee probably won't approve the budget for a gadget like this).

What I really like about ICEfaces (in comparison to trinidad, what we've used before):
  • Nice looking components (probably not the most important one from a development point of view, but hey, that's what sells the products and thus pays my salary :-))
  • Active and Helpful forum (http://www.icefaces.org/JForum/search/filters.page). This cannot be valued too high - in my opinion. I'd say roughly 70% of my questions could be answered by searching in the forum and checking the answers people with similar problems had - the other useful source is the public ICEfaces JIRA
  • Consistent attribute naming
    Trust me, this is really a big improvement comparing it with something like trinidad. When the attributes all are named consistently it is very easy to exchange components (replace a dataTable with an panelPositioned or a panelSeries for example, switching between inputText and outputText etc.)
  • Awesome features that come out-of-the-box
    - Push Server
    - Drag and Drop
    - and all the other nice things that can be seen in the component showcase
So, you can expect quite some posts about it and of course also my unfiltered opinion.

I'd like to kick it off with my first impressions after having looked at the (fairly new) composite component suite (http://composite-component-showcase.icefaces.org/icefaces-composite-comps-showcase/showcase.iface):
We just recently got access to it (licensewise) and this will really save us some time in future development. The new tables, dual lists and layout components look especially helpful for our current project. I'm really looking forward to using them as soon as possible.
In the past we've implemented something like filterable column headers on our own - we've got a working blueprint for this now, but it requires quite some knowledge about the surrounding program logic to get it successfully integrated in a complex screen.
Dual list won't save too much time (given, that you can also use two single lists and some backing bean data storing and controller methods) - but I'm always a big fan of writing fewer code.
The layout components will definetely play a big role concerning the sexy-factor of our application - and it is always nice to have a better looking UI for low costs ;-)

So, that's it for now - more will come quite soon.

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