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 layouts for our pages


Trinidad offers a set of layout components that help us to lay out our pages. In a way, they are comparable to layout managers in Java Swing. Layout components can easily be recognized by their names, which are always in the form<tr:panel...Layout>, where ... indicates the type of layout. Just like Swing layout managers, pretty much every layout you like can be achieved by nesting different layout components. Layout components do not add visible elements to the page; they only position their children.

There are also a lot of<tr:panel...> components that do add visual elements to the page and position their children. These components can be recognized by their names, which also start with panel, but do not end with Layout.

Using a border layout

The<tr:panelBorderLayout> component behaves a bit like a BorderLayout manager in Swing. The<tr:panelBorderLayout> component places its children in the center. It has 12 facets that are placed around...