ZK Expansion

Being a guy that works mostly with JBoss stack of J2EE and along with JSF suite along with facelets moving in using a different culture framework for the UI was a significant step. I checked alot but i find that ZK is what i would like to use.

ZK is a UI framework totaly coded in Java and is really powerful. Yet as i have spend most of my programming lifecycle using JSF, what i really liked was the navigation way done in JSF. So i

wrapped up and started coding a small extension on ZK to add support of JSF-like navigation

in the framework and have everything gathered in a .xml file and not around java classes. The

implementation involved using JAXB 2.0 along with a definition of XSD file for the format that

the xml should have. The result of these procedure is a really cool add on to the framework where

it helps even more to have a clear MVC model in the ZK framework.

Still it bugs me alot that the framework doesn't give all the components for free rather depending

on the version you miss some really cool components.

The integration with Spring is really smooth and along with Hibernate you can create powerful

web applications that are really close to desktop applications. Probably i will wrap up all that

in a small talk and i will commit it to the guys.

Λουξεμβουριανες εμπειριες...

Luxembourg calling.

The previous month i moved to Luxembourg to work for the European parliament. I have everything settled down and i have moved to my own apartment. I spend most of my time at work and when i am home i have spend alot of time reading new stuff. People here tend to be not that open as in Greece. Most of them tend to spend alot of time drinking bier. Still i enjoy the walks on the parks and the basketball i play with guys all over the world. Currently i am exploiting the usage of a new frame work i believe is quite good. Going back to work after a break in the army was quite fun since also there i used to code. Meet very interesting people and code some cool staff that are now in production. Here the only thing that makes me feel home seek is the weather. People at work are very welcoming and the helped me alot during the first month with all the admin stuff i should go with through. Yet another adventure then is about to begin...soon with more news!!!
stay tuned.

nick@army

Starting from 18 of August i had to join greek army to do my time in the army.Various thinks
have come and go in my head since then.Finally i think army is just yet another thing we all
must pass through.The main target is to be a phantom.Currently i am at Athens doing some stuff
on computer...(lol).From the next month i will move to Chios island.
There i have meet friends and some rather interesting/strange people.Yet we had great fun @
Lamia where we passed the first phase of our "training".Hope all guys are ok and soon we will meet.

OpenEJB 3.1 JBoss Embedded and EJB 3.0 unit testing

The past month i have been trying to create a framework for testing EJB 3.0 out of container.The result was that i spent most of my time testing the embedded version of
various Java application servers such as JBoss GlassFish OpenEJB etc.The major drawback in such a procedure is that the nature of EJB doesn't make them suitable for
out of container testing.
I tried alot the jboss embedded and ejb3 embedded projects from jboss.Apart from the
fact that these are in beta version still it was alot of buggy code.I download and patch some stuff and finally made it to work but with no luck in deploying successfully ejbs. After talking with the various contributors @ JBoss i stopped experimenting with jboss products and turned to openejb.
I manage very easily to integrate openejb in the maven build cycle and deploy most of
my ejbs.I configure it to work with oracle and hibernate,simulating as close as i can the production environment.All it took some maven dependencies and smart configuration in the project. Finally for testing purposes instead of junit i selected testNG which i think is far much better than junit.So the final configuration i think is a win situation for EJB 3 integration testing is:

• Hibernate
• OpenEJB 3.0
• EJB 3.0

These 3 seem to cooperate / coordinate really good.

I will return with details on how to define pom.xml dependencies.

@OTENET

OTENET a huge organization in Greece is now part of HTO(Hellenic Telecommunication Organization)...