JSF is not what we often think it is. It’s also a framework that can be somewhat tricky to debug, specially when first encountered. In this post let’s go over on why that is and provide some JSF debugging techniques. We will go through the following topics:

• JSF is not what we often think
• The difficulties of JSF debugging
• How to debug JSF systematically
• How JSF Works – The JSF lifecycle
• Debugging an Ajax request from browser to server and back
• Debugging the JSF frontend Javascript code
• Final thoughts – alternatives? (questions to the reader)

There might be cases when you want to quickly verify if your REST API, that is deployed either on dev, test or prod environments, is reachable altogether. A common way to do this is by building a generic resource that delivers for example the version of the deployed API. You can trigger a request to this resource manually or, even better, have a Jenkings/Hudson job, which runs a checkup job after deployment. In this post, I will present how to implement such a service that reads the implementation details from the application’s manifest file. The API verified, is the one developed in the Tutorial – REST API design and implementation in Java with Jersey and Spring

The first commandment that any young programmer learns is “Thou Shall Not Duplicate”. Thus instructed, whenever we see something that looks like it may be repeated code, we refactor. We create libraries and frameworks. But removing duplication doesn’t come for free.

I have recently started to build a public REST API with Java for Podcastpedia.org and for the JAX-RS implementation I have chosen Jersey, as I find it “natural” and powerful – you can find out more about it by following the Tutorial – REST API design and implementation in Java with Jersey and Spring.  Because Podcastpedia.org is a web application powered by Spring MVC, I wanted to integrate both frameworks in podcastpedia-web, to take advantage of the backend service functionality already present in the project. Anyway this short post will present the steps I had to take to make the integration between the two frameworks work.

Transactions are omnipresent in today’s enterprise systems, providing data integrity even in highly concurrent environments. So let’s get started by first defining the term and the context where you might usually employ it.