sun's blueprints

Very nice. I just had another look at Duncan Mills' Autosuggest tutorial using Sun's blueprint project. I am really beginning to understand what they were doing. I downloaded a bunch more stuff to look at on the plane going back to Virginia. Very interesting.

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jdev/tips/mills/AjaxAutoSuggest/AjaxAutoSuggest.html

This is the article I am talking about. I looked at it a year or so ago; I understand it much better today. The blueprint project has a bunch of very useful, interesting custom JSF component code to look at for free. What a learning opportunity.

So was able to implement this as is, but I had some trouble using the BindingContainer. But I used #{data..dataProvider} to get the application module instead of going through the bindings layer, and that got me to the same place. I have not isolated the exact trouble with the bindings layer yet.

I realize that the BindingContainer layer (JSR 227?) is very important, but I believe I am still abiding by the overall architechtural bent of using the Application Module as a repository for services, and accessing only the exposed ones. Right now I just have some vague notion that creating a PageDef and hooking it into the DataBindings.cpx file is somehow fraut with opportunities to make mistakes. I have made a variety of mistakes setting these up, but the binding layer issues have the trouble of not yet revealing to me how on earth to troubleshoot the problem. I only see that when I get the value for #{bindings} that it is null.

Ah well. On the lighter side, I was able to download the source for this textfield.jar that this example uses; and I was able to get the source working just fine. I also obtained the source to the other aspects of J2EE blueprints avaialble in the same download, and also an additional download which gives the updates for Java EE 5.0 :-)

That should keep me busy on those 3.5 hour plane-trips. ;-)

One thing I would like to improve upon for this component is that it does not respond to a down arrow or up-arrow. I think this should be doable.