ICEfaces – AJAX framework for Java EE – has been open sourced (via Ajaxian). Check out its new home. ICEfaces is an extension of the JavaServer Faces technology and is hence inherently server based. It does not have any requirements on the client side. Earlier the community edition had been opened up for the developers. This is a welcome news for the Java community coupled with the news of Sun opening up Java.
Sadly, the feeling after some digging around is that ICEsoft has withheld information required for applying to enterprise applications, like scaling, for which we have been asked to refer to Enterprise Support Package.
ICEfaces definitely has a lot of technology merit. It has been worked on for quite some time. It also holds lot of advantages over traditional AJAX which involves the client side JavaScript. However, if ICEsoft does not provide practical information along with opening up the source code, the cost of adopting it might rise resulting in hesitancy. Since ICEfaces has not come out of community effort, ICEsoft as to provide some kind of forum or panel where the practical problems in its application can be answered. Otherwise traditional AJAX might get too tempting and easy to implement.
November 14th, 2006 at 9:33 pm
Adding the Enterprise capabilities to the open source bundle is definitely something to consider. If you had to advocate it to management, what would you emphasize?
We expect that ICEfaces.org will become a highly valuable repository of practical information for developers (in particular the forums and contributed applications). Over time ICEsoft (with community input) will add several “starting point” applications to give you the key pieces to build your application around. Are there other forms of practical information you would like to see?
November 14th, 2006 at 11:19 pm
Hi Ted,
Thanks for clarifying things. I am sure forums will be actively used for support. There are also whitepapers in the resources. There is no problem even if there are no enterprise capabilities directly integrated. But the some documentation of scalability techniques or tips of working with ICEfaces would help as others can build them now. Information like performance benchmarks, scalability, best practices and recommendations are something that will encourage someone to pick it up quicker. This is important because till today this information was only with ICEsoft.
November 15th, 2006 at 12:20 am
Excellent point; people need to share what works and what doesn’t in terms of large scale deployments so that best practices can be refined. This could be a forum topic, but maybe it would work better as a wiki on icefaces.org?
November 15th, 2006 at 7:01 am
Oh yes, a wiki would be great.