On Oct 18, 2006, at 5:46 PM, David Geary wrote:
If not working on it, I've been thinking about the homepage lately,
and it
strikes me that I don't really know how to spin Shale. We have so many
unrelated features that it's difficult to say "Shale is...". The
addition of
JPA makes things even murkier. Are we one-stop shopping for JSF?
Proving
ground for JSF 2.0? I know we're a set of services, but that's a
rather
bland description.
I agree. Until about 4 months ago I only knew very little about
JSF. I had not actually written a JSF app. Now, I'm in the middle
of writing a pretty significant JSF app and teaching our team of
developers how (and why) to use JSF. So I've gone in head first :-)
Before I started this adventure I had a difficult time seeing where
Shale fit. Now I'm starting to see the plugin points where it makes
sense and hopefully we will start integrating Shale into our app in
the near future.
Maybe it's something like a "meta-framework". It's not really a
"framework" as such because JSF is the framework. But it is some
missing parts that integrate fairly seamlessly with the JSF
framework. Missing parts and added value - things like Clay and
Dialog are added value. Things like the core ViewController provide
missing pieces to the core JSF framework. Maybe some of the missing
pieces should be submitted back as JSRs and we could work ourselves
out of a job in that sense. Or maybe not. Maybe they are not as
universally applicable as it seems at first glance.
Of course as JSR-299 progresses we may find ourselves in a different
category. There has been talk of building a JSR-299 implementation
when the time is right.
Greg
