I've run into Archimate some months ago, while trying to find an standard way to represent the architecture of the systems and enterprises I was working with. I found it very interesting: I draw some examples and found the results quite good: the models were very expressive, although I'd say Visio drawings look better. Anyway, I've decided to use it and try to realize its full power. Some questions I'll try to answer while adopting it:

- does the model scale? I realize this is hard for any modeling technique, and the key is the abstraction level the model is developed with, but I hope to find an easy way of doing this with Archimate.

- is it really good? I wonder that just because I don't see it used in a lot of places, so I wonder why: maybe it is just a question of knowing it exists, maybe it is too hard for most people to use. Time will tell.

Meanwhile, here are some good links:

- Archimate official page: http://www.opengroup.org/archimate/

- Archimate linkedin group: http://www.linkedin.com/groups/ArchiMate-50758?gid=50758&trk=hb_side_g

- Free modeling tool: http://archi.cetis.ac.uk/

Trying to update this as soon as getting more info....

I'be been following JSF development for quite some time now. I remember around 2001 reading about the technology, how it would render web or rich desktop applications, just by changing the render kit.

I guess that is changed now: jsf, although still having the rendering kits, is aimed 'just' for web development. Still, it has failed to gain the main traction that it was expected to have as a web development framework. I clearly remember a charge on the server side, where they would show JSF being offered as a lighter alternative for struts, but the size of the 'lighte'r iron ball was much bigger than the struts one...

Well, anyway, after some disappointment in the past (everything is a post, no bookmarkable urls, jsp/jsf lifecyle issues) and the release of jsf 2.0, I decided to try it again... So, here I go...

First of all, since I decided to start with faces 2.0, I started looking for component libraries that supported it... I just found the impressive primefaces (http://primefaces.org/) to be fully compatible. It started good: great performance, composite component stuff in jboss tools was great and the easy of use amazing. But I started having some issues, where some stuff would render well in a browser, but not in others. I looked through my code and could not find anything wrong, so I started thinking that I could get luckier using one of the others, more established frameworks.

Tried icefaces 2.0.0 aplha 2, but soon had issues rendering select boxes, so drop it.

Then I looked back to richfaces (my choice some years ago) - 3.3.3 'supports' jsf 2.0, but does not work for most of what you would expect (jsf 330 for instance), the new get tags....

I was able to find the 4.0.0 alpha 1 release, and even in the release page jboss warned about two big issues, I've downloaded and tried the demo, but dropped since it looks like just some part of the components are available there.

By that time, I was really thinking how 10 years of development did not make jsf much good, and looked again at the zk toolkig again (http://www.zkoss.org/) - this one is quite impressive and has been on my radar for some time as well, but again I decided that I should try the 'standards' a little more, since we ever write applications alone these days.

Well, got back and set the target to one of the most used jsf component library these days: richfaces 3.3.3, and that is what I am playing with right now.

Like most of the frameworks reported above, the easy, standard stuff is pretty easy to get. Things get a bit more complicated when you try to use advanced features...

For instance, I hate to repeat myself a lot in code, so I prefer to always write components that would write the code for me...

I am writing a component that is able to render quite a few controls on the screen at the same time, so I can get a 'standard' view for my entities - it is like templating, but since I would like to determine some stuff dynamically, I am set to write it entirely in java.

Finally it seems to be working now, and that will be the code for my next post.

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Well, just to let everyone know, I quit trying to go that root for JSF 2: although I do like primefaces capabilities, I find JSF quite a great idea, I don't really think it is a good bet keep pushing JSF anymore. I've decided to develop a desktop application using a full desktop application.