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

Chapter 3. Facelets

One of the strong properties of JSF is the fact that it has the ability to use various view technologies. The default view technology in JSF 1.x is JavaServer Pages (JSP). Because the JSP standard was defined before JSF even existed, it was never optimized for use with JSF. Therefore, JSP has quite a few shortcomings as a view technology for JSF. Facelets aims to overcome these shortcomings. Although Facelets is not an official standard yet, it doesn’t make sense not to use it. In JSF 2.0, Facelets is part of the standard and is the preferred view technology.

Facelets is not part of Apache MyFaces. This chapter is included in this book as not much documentation is available on Facelets yet.

After reading this chapter, you should be able to:

  • Convince anyone that Facelets should be used as the view technology for any new JSF project

  • Set up a JSF project with Facelets

  • Create and use Facelets page templates

  • Create and use you own composition components with Facelets

Why Facelets...