Practical Linux Forum (Sa, 06.05.2006)

Better, Faster, Lighter: Developing Java Web Applications with Apache MyFaces and Hibernate

von Christian Egli (Novell (Schweiz) AG)

Samstag, 06.05.2006, Saal 11B, 15:00-16:00 Uhr

Java Server Faces (JSF) is a new Java Community Process standard for building web-based user interfaces. It is ideal for web programming and, much like traditional GUI frameworks, features rich, powerful user interface widgets and event-driven development models. Its Model-View-Controller (MVC) design is very similar to classical GUI frameworks such as Swing. Apache MyFaces (http://myfaces.apache.org/) is the open source implementation of the JSF specification.

Hibernate (http://www.hibernate.org) is a lightweight object/relational mapping service for Java, i.e. it takes care of storing your Java objects in a database and automates all the interaction between the objects and the database.

JSF can be combined with Hibernate to provide an ideal framework for a wide range of database-driven web applications. In this talk we will introduce the two aforementioned technologies and then demonstrate the power of their combination by developing a simple example of a typical database-driven web application. This part of the talk will be very hands-on as we walk through code snippets and config files to illustrate the concepts and illuminate the inner workings of the application.

Finally, as Ruby on Rails (http://www.rubyonrails.org/) is increasingly used these days to implement database-driven web applications, we will compare our combination to Ruby on Rails.

The target audience is web developers. Knowledge of Java and SQL is beneficial but not necessary.

Ideally the talk would be slotted back to back with a Ruby on Rails talk to give the audience a chance to better compare the two.

Über den Autor Christian Egli:

Christian Egli was born in Canada and grew up in Switzerland. He graduated as a software engineer from ETH in Zürich, Switzerland. He works as a Senior Linux Consultant for Novell Switzerland.

In a former life he was one of the core committers of Apache Lenya, an open source CMS based on Cocoon.

In his copious spare time he tries with very little success to teach his year old son the virtues of the Emacs key bindings.