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 dialogs


Using dialogs in web applications is never a trivial thing to do. Trinidad doesn’t offer us a solution that makes using dialogs trivial, but the Trinidad dialog framework does make the use of dialogs a lot easier. Before we dive into this dialog framework, let’s briefly understand what the unique features of a dialog are. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialog_box), a dialog (box) is:

a special window, used in user interfaces to display information to the user, or to get a response if needed.

From a software engineering perspective, we should also realize that the same dialog box can potentially be used from different screens in an application. This means that a dialog should not have to know anything about the page it is called from. Now let’s see how the Trinidad dialog framework helps us to create dialogs that can return values to their calling pages without any knowledge of the calling page. We’ll do this by building an example dialog. We’ll build...