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

Using special components


The RichFaces component library includes a number of special-purpose components that can be used to enhance the functionality of an existing JSF application. Some examples of these include the RichFaces HtmlGmap and HtmlVirtualEarth components, which render a Google Maps object and a Microsoft Virtual Earth object respectively.

Rendering a Google Maps object

The<rich:gmap> tag can be used to render a Google Maps object on our JSF page. This tag can be combined with Ajax4jsf tags to integrate the Google map with custom JavaScript functions and JSF backing bean data.

In this example, we will be using the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) to transfer data between our JSF application and web browser. Ajax4jsf supports this data transfer format and automatically serializes our Java objects into JSON data structures.

To begin, we write a new Java class named Location that will encapsulate the geographic information needed to display different locations on the...