Book Image

Apache MyFaces 1.2 Web Application Development

Book Image

Apache MyFaces 1.2 Web Application Development

Overview of this book

Hypes and trends (such as Web 2.0) cause a change in the requirements for user interfaces every now and then. While a lot of frameworks are capable of meeting those changing requirements, it often means you as a developer need in-depth knowledge of web standards, such as XHTML and JavaScript. A framework like Apache MyFaces that hides all details of how the page is rendered at the client and at the same time offers a rich set of tools and building blocks could save you a lot of time, not only when you're building a brand new application but also when you're adapting an existing application to meet new user interface requirements.This book will teach you everything you need to know to build appealing web interfaces with Apache MyFaces and maintain your code in a pragmatic way. It describes all the steps that are involved in building a user interface with Apache MyFaces. This includes building templates and composition components with Facelets, using all sorts of specialized components from the Tomahawk, Trinidad, and Tobago component sets and adding validation with MyFaces Extensions Validator.The book uses a step-by-step approach and contains a lot of tips based on experience of the MyFaces libraries in real-world projects. Throughout the book an example scenario is used to work towards a fully functional application when the book is finished.This step-by-step guide will help you to build a fully functional and powerful application.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Apache MyFaces 1.2
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
Preface
Trinidad Tags
Trinidad Text Keys
Default JSF Error Messages
ExtVal Default Error Messages

Why Facelets?


Facelets has a lot of improvements over JSP as a view technology for JSF. This section provides an overview of the most important improvements of Facelets over JSP, starting with content interweaving, in the next subsection.

Content inverweaving

One of the things that makes the combination of JSF with JSP complicated is the problem of content interweaving. Although the situation is somewhat improved since JSF 1.2 and JSP 2.1, both technologies still create their own representation of a page in memory. This is not only inefficient, but can also generate problems if JSF components are mixed with non-JSF content. (Think of problems with regards to the order in which elements are shown in the rendered page, and for user interface elements that are not aware of each other.) For that reason, it is advisable not to make such mix-ups when using JSP.

Facelets fixes this issue by creating a single component tree. This tree contains both JSF components and non-JSF elements such as plain...