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

Setting up a Facelets project


Of course, installing Facelets starts with downloading it. The Facelets library can be downloaded from https://facelets.dev.java.net/. The latest release can be found through Documents & files in the Project tools menu. Stable releases are under the releases node of the tree menu. Unzip the downloaded file to the location where all other JSF libraries are stored.

Now that we have the Facelets library, we need to make sure that it will be in the WEB-INF/lib directory of our web application. We can follow the same procedure as described in Chapter 2, where we added the other JSF libraries. Make sure that you select the appropriate option to force the Facelets library to be included on deployment. Only the jsf-facelets.jar file is needed, which is in the root of the Facelets distribution.

Preparing web.xml

As Facelets is a replacement for JSP, we will no longer create JSP files. This means we need a new file extension. Facelets doesn’t define its own file extension...