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

Creating and using composition components


At first, you might be wondering why you should ever create your own components. Especially when you look at those extensive sets of readymade components in the Trinidad, Tobago, and Tomahawk project, you might wonder why there is still a need to create your own composition components. The reason is simple—no one but you can create a component that exactly fits your needs and application. This means that you often have to combine different components, validators, and converters.

Combining is not a problem, but what if you have to make the same combination of components a couple of times? Then you’re breaking the DRY principle; you are repeating yourself! We will look at the login page of the MIAS system as an example. As this is a rather simple page with a very limited number of fields, the benefits of using composition components are perhaps not that clear to see in this example. But imagine if the page is twice as large and you have dozens of pages...