There’s an article about SiteMesh here.
I haven’t tried it out yet, but I’ll my sure to include it in my test project. I’m currently doing a small project to test new ideas and products. Many of the ideas I’m exploring is based on the excellent Domain Driven Design book by Eric Evans.
Products on my test schedule include:
Finding a good domain model, combining it with good products and using the products correctly is a hughe challenge. I hope I’ll get it mostly right one day. 😉
DWR (Direct Web Remoting) is a library that lets you do AJAX style calls to your beans wrapped on the server side by a Servlet. It seems like it dynamically creates javascript functions corresponding to you bean methods. Neat. I’ll have to take a closer look at it later. Of course you’re still stuck with handling much of the browser compatibility issues when modifying your DOM with new data, but it does have some utils that should make it easier.
It seems Oracle has announced that it will help develop an EJB3 compliant ORM mapping tool for Eclipse. We’re using their TopLink mapping workbench today, and having a similar tool inside Eclipse would be a great asset to us. It really makes mapping easy, and could save lots of time. I’ll be looking forward to this.