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

Templating with Facelets


Now that we have installed Facelets into our project, it’s time to explore its interesting features. Let’s start with templating, as that is probably the thing that we miss the most in JSF.

Creating a template

We are going to create a template for our MIAS system. With Facelets, a template is just an ordinary XHTML page with placeholders for the content. For the placeholders, we use the<ui:insert> tag. It has one compulsory attribute, name. This name is used to refer to the placeholder in any page that uses the template. A placeholder can be empty, such as the<ui:insert name="content"/> tag in the next example. If the placeholder is not empty, the contents will serve as default content when no value is applied by the page using the template. An example of this is the highlighted lines in the next example. If the page does not define a title, the text ** NO TITLE SET ** will appear in the title bar of the browser.

Another feature of Facelets that is demonstrated...