WebProNews

Project Woodstock from Sun Microsystems arrives as a new open source project for developing enterprise-level web applications. The legendary '69 concert isn't being reprised again in Upstate New York. Too bad, really; Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz has the right hair for the rock stage. Of course we don't know anything about his musicianship. The only musical thing he might be able to play could be an iPod. Sun's Project Woodstock will offer something different than playlists taped on the back of Telecasters. Their 'On The Record' blog called Woodstock a "project that provides an extensive set of JavaServer Faces (JSF) components for web application developers":

The Project Woodstock components also contain design time code to enable their use in NetBeans Visual Web Pack 5.5 for easy web application development via dragging and dropping components onto a layout page, allowing the developer to visually organize their application as they build it. Project Woodstock components range from navigation (Tree, Tab, Breadcrumb) to selectors (ListBox, AddRemove) to date management (Calendar, Scheduler) to a Masthead (with Alarm and Job Status notification) to a Wizard and also a very extensible Table (with sorting, filtering and easy data connection setup).

A preview of the components online give developers a look at what is available in Woodstock. The project expects to add several features in the third quarter of this year, including an Ajax calendar and some Ajax-enabled navigation components for Woodstock's 4.1 release. Java Modules With Linux Packaging: Sun's chief engineer for the Java Platform, Standard Edition at Sun, recently blogged about how Linux packaging systems might interact with JSR 277. A discussion over the weekend during FOSDEM 2007 led to Mark Reinhold experiencing this epiphany:

A key new insight we had is that it would be useful for JSR 277 to support a notion of source modules, just as the various Linux packaging systems support source packages. This would allow Linux source packages to install Java source code in a standard way so that development tools that require source code (e.g., IDEs, debuggers, and pro?lers) could locate that code in a standard way rather than by groveling through the ?lesystem or asking the user.

"The existing Linux packaging systems can already handle shared libraries, so there’s no (obvious) reason why they won’t also be able to handle Java modules," said Reinhold. ---