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

Using AJAX and Partial Page Rendering


Although the big AJAX hype is over, today a web application cannot be taken seriously if it doesn’t leverage some AJAX functionality. And that’s a good thing, as AJAX can help us to make our applications more interactive and user-friendly. In the early days of Trinidad, when it was still called Oracle ADF Faces, and before the big AJAX hype started off, it already had a feature called "Partial Page Rendering", or PPR for short. In those days this feature used inline frames under the hood.

Today Trinidad still calls this feature Partial Page Rendering, although it’s now based on "real" AJAX technologies, such as XMLHttpRequest and JavaScript. That is, by the way, a great example of the benefits of the abstraction that JSF components give us. Because of this abstraction, the Trinidad team was able to re-implement the whole Partial Page Rendering feature using AJAX technology, while keeping the way we use Partial Page Rendering in our pages the same...