This year, Brian Leonard, and I (diva #2) are putting on the Developing (J)Ruby on Rails Applications with the NetBeans™ IDE hands-on lab at JavaOne. If you haven't tried developing a web application using Ruby on Rails, this is a good opportunity to get your feet wet. For those of you who are familiar with Ruby but haven't tried it in the IDE, you will also find this lab helpful. In this lab, you build the classic Ruby web log, you access the FreeTTS Java API to speach-enable the application, and you deploy the application to the GlassFish application server.

Speaking of JavaOne, in last year's hands-on-lab, one of the exercises was to use Dynamic Faces to build a chat room application. This section has been turned into the Building an Ajax Chat Room with the Ajax Transaction Dynamic Faces Component tutorial which is available from the NetBeans Web Application Learning Trail.

About the picture. Right behind me is flowing lava. To be able to walk right up to 1200 degree Celsius lava flow was an awesome experience. Fortunately, because the lava contains a large amount of glass, the lava flows very slowly.

For those of you who were not able to attend our JavaOne 2007 hands-on lab, the lab is now available online at http://developers.sun.com/learning/javaoneonline/j1labs.jsp?track=8&yr=2007.

The lab starts off showing how to use dynamic faces Ajax zones to easily enable plain old JavaServer Faces components to send Ajax requests, and, in turn, dynamically update other components with the Ajax response. You also use an Ajax Transaction to continually poll the server. When you have completed the exercise, you have a simple chat room, like the one shown above. In the instructor-led lab, we had the web app running on the demo machine so you could watch us chatting with the lab attendees. The lab file contains an older version of the dynamic faces component library. To get the more recent one, see Installing the Currency Trader Sample Application at the NetBeans Visual Web Application documentation page.

In the second part of the lab, Winston and the Andersons show how to build a JavaServer Faces component from scratch, and use dynamic faces internally to Ajaxify the component.

The final section shows how to leverage jMaki to create a JavaScript component from one of the popular frameworks into a JavaServer Faces component. You can learn more about jMaki at ajax.dev.java.net and about the componentized widgets at widgets.dev.java.jet.

One of the things I have been working on for the last few months is writing about the Visual Web Pack Dynamic Faces component library that has been under development, and a very cool chat program that Matt designed to demonstrate this technology.

The Dynamic Faces technology, which comes from the JSF Extensions project, makes it extremely easy to Ajaxify plain old JavaServer Faces components.

The Visual Web Pack Dynamic Faces component library is now available from the NetBeans Update Center, along with another sample application that Matt wrote. To learn how to obtain and install the library and sample application, see Installing the Currency Trader Sample Application, available from the NetBeans Visual Web Pack documentation page.

If you are attending JavaOne 2007, and you are interested in Dynamic faces, here are some sessions, labs, and BOFs to check out:

• BOF-6825: Testing Web 2.0 Features, Using Real-World Applications by Prakash Narayan and Ed Burns
• TS-9511: Using Ajax With POJC (Plain Old JavaServer Faces Components) by Craig McClanahan and Matthew Bohm
• S288058: Building Ajax-Enabled JavaServer Faces Components and Web Applications With jMaki, Dynamic Faces, and the NetBeans IDE by Greg Murray, Craig McClanhan, Ludovic Champenois, and Roberto Chinichi. This presentation is at CommunityOne which is a free event.
• Lab-4460: Building Ajax-Enabled JavaServer Faces Components and Web Applications with jMaki, Dynamic Faces, and the NetBeans IDE, by me, Craig McClanahan, Matthew Bohm, Winston Prakash, and the Andersons.

Also, come by the NetBeans Visual Web Pack booth at the JavaOne pavillion to see demos of how easy it is to use the Dynamic Faces technology. Tell them Chris sent you .

For the past few months, I have been collaborating with a great group of people to bring you a fantastic hands on lab for JavaOne. This lab, session # LAB-4460 Building Ajax-Enabled JavaServer Faces Components and Web Applications With jMaki, Dynamic Faces, and the NetBeans IDE, was put together by Craig McClanahan, Matthew Bohm, Gail and Paul Anderson, Winston Prakash, and myself. It starts out by showing how to use Dynamic Faces (JSF Extensions) to add Ajax functionality to plain old JavaServer Faces components. It then teaches you how to build your own JSF Ajax-enabled component and add design-time features so that you can use it in the NetBeans Visual Web Pack. Last, it shows how to build a JSF component from a jMaki widget. By leveraging an existing jMaki widget and specialized base classes, you quickly build an Ajax-enabled JavaServer Faces component offering a rich user interface with a minimum of code.

They will also be handing out CDs of the hands on labs. The CDs contain additional labs including another lab (4420) that Craig, Matt, and I wrote that covers some of the above material as well as how to use the jMaki-wrapped DHTML Goodies Tooltip widget. In addition, the CD contains lab 4450. I contributed a section to this lab that shows how to use the jMaki-wrapped Dojo Fisheye widget.