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

Skinning


Trinidad has the possibility for skinning. This means that you can customize the look and feel of every Trinidad component to fit your taste or company style. Skinning is done by means of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). So, depending on how far you want to diverge from the default skin, a level of experience with CSS is needed. Given the large number of components that Trinidad has, you can imagine that skinning every little detail of all available components can be an awful lot of work.

The good news is that the Trinidad skinning mechanism makes good use of the cascading part of CSS, and even takes it a level higher. For example, if we only want to change some colors, we can do just that and inherit all of the defaults from the default skin. In this section, we will focus on the Trinidad-specific stuff. Diving into CSS and explaining how to use it is beyond the scope of this book. Should we want to create an advanced skin, probably the best thing to do is to ask a professional web...