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

Working with dates and calendars


Displaying dates is often not very difficult. A simple text output with some date pattern applied to it will be sufficient most of the time. However, letting users enter a date is a whole different story. Today, users more-or-less expect some nice calendar pop up or something similar to input a date. To cater for this need, Tomahawk offers us two different date input components— <t:inputCalendar> and <t:inputDate>. The former displays a little calendar, either inline or as a pop up. The latter displays separate fields for day, month, and year, where the month field is displayed as a drop-down list. Both can optionally let the user enter a time, too. We will only take a look at the <t:inputCalendar> component in this book. The <t:inputDate> component has some issues with Facelets and also lacks the possibility to change the order of the day, month, and year fields. This makes this component rather useless.

The <t:inputCalendar&gt...