Book Image

JSF 1.2 Components

By : IAN HLAVATS
Book Image

JSF 1.2 Components

By: IAN HLAVATS

Overview of this book

Today's web developers need powerful tools to deliver richer, faster, and smoother web experiences. JavaServer Faces includes powerful, feature-rich, Ajax-enabled UI components that provide all the functionality needed to build web applications in a Web 2.0 world. It's the perfect way to build rich, interactive, and "Web 2.0-style" Java web apps. This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the most popular JSF components available today and demonstrate step-by-step how to build increasingly sophisticated JSF user interfaces with standard JSF, Facelets, Apache Tomahawk/Trinidad, ICEfaces, JBoss Seam, JBoss RichFaces/Ajax4jsf, and JSF 2.0 components. JSF 1.2 Components is both an excellent starting point for new JSF developers, and a great reference and “how to” guide for experienced JSF professionals. This book progresses logically from an introduction to standard JSF HTML, and JSF Core components to advanced JSF UI development. As you move through the book, you will learn how to build composite views using Facelets tags, implement common web development tasks using Tomahawk components, and add Ajax capabilities to your JSF user interface with ICEfaces components. You will also learn how to solve the complex web application development challenges with the JBoss Seam framework. At the end of the book, you will be introduced to the new and up-coming JSF component libraries that will provide a road map of the future JSF technologies.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
JSF 1.2 Components
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Configuring a JSF application to use Facelets


Java web applications consist of compiled Java classes, XML configuration files, static resources, and other artifacts. To enable Facelets in our JSF application, we must configure our web.xml file with a few context parameters, which are used by the Facelets framework.

Note

Mapping the FacesServlet

The FacesServlet is the front controller of the JSF application. Incoming requests are mapped to this servlet using different URI patterns. Although it is possible to map any arbitrary prefix and/or file extension to the FacesServlet, for simplicity, we have chosen to use the .jsf file extension for both the FacesServlet mapping pattern and for our Facelets XHTML documents.

Configuring web.xml

The following example demonstrates some of the context parameters that we set in web.xml to enable the Facelets ViewHandler. Notice that we set the facelets.REFRESH_PERIOD parameter to true to enable more verbose output during page development. This parameter...