A Complete Tour of JSF 2

A Complete Tour of JavaServer Faces 2.0 Jim Driscoll [email_address] Andy Schwartz [email_address]

What's new?

Almost Everything

Faces Expert Group

Sun – Ed Burns, Roger Kitain (Spec leads)
Oracle
Apache
IceFaces
RichFaces
RedHat / Seam
Book Authors
Many more

All of the Faces of Faces at Sun R Ed Burns Jim Driscoll Roger Kitain Ryan Lubke

Most of the Faces of the EG Andy Schwartz Dan Allen Alexandr Smirnov Ken Paulsen Martin Marinschek Pete Muir Kito Mann Joe Ottinger Ted Goddard Neil Griffin Jason Lee David Geary Mike Freedman Gavin King R Jeremy Grelle Keith Donald Ed Burns Jim Driscoll Roger Kitain Ryan Lubke

Some Faces of the Faces Community Andy Schwartz Dan Allen Jacob Hookom Alexandr Smirnov Ken Paulsen Martin Marinschek Matthias We ßendorf Pete Muir Alexander Jesse Imre O ßwald Yara Senger Lincoln Baxter III Adam Winer Craig McClanahan Kito Mann Rick Hightower Joe Ottinger Ted Goddard Neil Griffin Jason Lee Stan Silvert David Geary Mike Freedman Gavin King Hazem Saleh Çağatay Çivici Dennis Byrne Roger Keays Amy Fowler Max Katz R Jeremy Grelle Keith Donald

Community Ideas

Innovation happens everywhere
Most ideas were proven in the community before adoption
Some approaches (i.e., Ajax) required a good deal of merging
Highlights on each feature

Features, features

Facelets

Almost exactly the same as existing Facelets technology
JSP still supported, but...

All new features will be in Facelets
Facelets now the preferred View Declaration Language

Designed for JSF from the beginning

Facelets

XHTML based – document validation
Better error handling, including line numbers
Library prefixes as namespaces
EL directly in page:

#{bean.propertyname}

Templating made easy

ui:composition, ui:define, ui:insert
ui:include, ui:repeat

Composite Components

This...

Becomes this...

Or maybe this:

Enable True Abstraction

Create a true, reusable, component from an arbitrary region of a page
Built by composing other components

Full support for using attached objects in the using page, and mapping them to arbitrary targets within the composite component

Action methods
Validators, etc

Builds on top of Resources and Facelets
Heavily leverages naming conventions

Resource dir
Library name is directory name
Tag name is file name

Essentially special-case templating

Composite Component In file ctx-root/resources/simpleout/out.xhtml: <composite:interface> <composite:attribute name="value" required="true"/> </composite:interface> <composite:implementation> <h:outputText value="#{cc.attrs.value}" style="background-color: yellow"/> </composite:implementation>

Composite Component <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html" xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core" xmlns:ez="http://java.sun.com/jsf/composite/simpleout"> .... <ez:out value="Test Value"/> ....

Ajax

Inspiration: ADF Faces, RichFaces, IceFaces, DynamicFaces
Two entry points:

Declarative: <f:ajax> tag, uses AjaxBehavior
Programmatic ajax: resource library javax.faces , resource name jsf.js , JavaScript namespace jsf.ajax.

jsf.ajax.request function

Ajax

Declarative ajax: useful to ajaxify non ajax pages

Add ajax behaviors “invisibly”
Supports many Ajax usecases

JavaScript Ajax API usage pattern

jsf.ajax.request() JavaScript function
Integrate with existing Ajax widgets

Simplify lifecycle view: execute and render

Ajax Tag Example <h:outputText id="out1" value="#{count.count}"/> <h:commandButton value="Count"> <f:ajax render=”out1”/> </h:commandButton>

Partial State Saving

Inspired by Trinidad state saving
Save only the state that's changed since creation of the component tree
Per-view state size up to 4X smaller than before
Default for pages written with Facelets
Of interest to Java custom component authors
All standard components implement this feature - your composite components will automatically take advantage of it.

Partial State Saving

PartialStateHolder behavioral interface, extends existing StateHolder .

PartialStateHolder.markInitialState()

StateHelper , from UIComponent , does most of the work: replace ivars with keys within StateHelper

No longer need custom saveState/restoreState() implementations

Simplify Custom Components public class MyInput extends UIComponentBase { private enum Keys { name } public String getName() { return getStateHelper().get(name); } public void setName(String nameParam) { getStateHelper().put(name, nameParam); } }

View Parameters

Inspired by Page Parameters from JBoss Seam
Provides a way to map request parameters to special components within the view
<f:metadata>
<f:viewParam>

View Parameters <f:metadata> <f:viewParam name="foo" value="#{bean.foo}"/> </f:metadata> page1.xhtml?foo=bar bean.foo will equal “bar”

View Parameters

UIViewParameter extends UIInput
All attached objects valid for UIInput are valid – validation and conversion
Breaks the tyranny of POST
Lays the foundation for Bookmarkable pages

System Events

Influenced by JSFTemplating

Inspired by Solaris Dtrace, Linux strace, etc.

Publish/Subscribe event bus for things that happen during the JSF Lifecycle
Adds to event listening abilities:

FacesEvent/FacesListener
PhaseEvent/PhaseListener
SystemEvent/SystemEventListener

System Event Types

System Events

Listeners can be registered at three scopes

component UIComponent.subscribeToEvent()
view UIViewRoot.subscribeToEvent()
application Application.subscribeToEvent()

Publish is always Application.publishEvent()

Declarative System Events <h:inputText> <f:event type="preValidate" listener="#{bean.doSomePreValidation}"/> </h:inputText>

Resources

Avoid need for separate Filter or Servlet.
Resources are logically related to components, treat them that way.
Load from Classpath, or filesystem
Full support for “Library” concept, I18N, Versioning

Resources Java API

@ResourceDependency or @ResourceDependencies annotation on

UIComponent , Renderer , Validator , Converter , ClientBehavior

attributes for resource name, library name
attribute for target: head, body, form
Built in support for CSS, Image, JavaScript resources

Resources Markup API

<h:head> , <h:body>

Used for resource relocation targets

<h:outputScript> , <h:outputStylesheet>

Attributes for resource name, library name
Attribute for target: head, body, form
Smart includes, useful for composite components

Resource EL

#{resource['<resource>']}
#{resource['<library>:<resource>']}
Examples of use

<a href="#{resource['header.jpg']}" />
<h:graphicImage value="#{resource['corp:header.jpg']}" />

Behaviors

A Behavior is an interface and invents a new type of “attached object” which takes part in decode/encode.
ClientBehavior extends Behavior
Define things that happen in the view, in the browser
Currently only one standard ClientBehavior implementation: AjaxBehavior
New interface: ClientBehaviorHolder , implemented by all components in javax.faces.component.html
Special ClientBehaviorRenderer , does not extend Renderer .

getScript() , decode()

View Traversal

1.2: UIComponent.invokeOnComponent()

Single component in context

VisitContext.createVisitContext()
UIComponent.visitTree(VisitContext)

Multiple components in context

Used on Ajax requests for partial traversal
Used by new StateManagementStrategy

More features

Annotations
Navigation
Exceptions
Validation
EL
Scopes
Project Stage

Annotations

@ManagedBean
@*Scoped (Session, Request, etc)
@ManagedProperty
@FacesComponent
@FacesConverter
etc.
With implicit Navigation, may eliminate need for faces-config.xml in many cases

Navigation

Bookmarkable Pages

Uses View Parameters to ensure request params are validated before rendering page
New components <h:link> , <h:button> , cause the browser to submit GET request, contrast with <h:command{Button|Link}>
<f:param> add GET params
<h:button outcome=”next” value=”Go” includeViewParams=”true”/>

Inverse mapping of view params

Navigation

Implicit Navigation

If you don’t want all that <navigation-rules> stuff, you can put the navigation logic straight in the page.

Conditional Navigation – if statements
ConfigurableNavigationHandler

Query navigation rules at run-time

Exceptions

ExceptionHandler

can be decorated
all interesting exceptions flow through the exception handler!
new exception type: UpdateModelException

ValidatorException contains multiple FacesMessages

EL

#{component} , #{cc} (composite component) : get the “currently” processed component / composite component
#{component.clientId}
#{component.messageList}

EL

Make ActionEvent param optional for action-listeners
For EE6, EL method invocation supports parameters

makes f:setPropertyActionListener obsolete

Validation

Integration with JSR 303: Bean Validation

@NotEmpty private String name;
default validator: javax.faces.Bean – automatically applied to all input fields

Default-validator: hook up a validator for all instances of EditableValueHolder
preValidate/postValidate system events

New Validation Tags

<f:validateBean>

Beans validation tag

<f:validateRequired>

Required field

<f:validateRegexp>

Regular expression validation

New Scopes

“ conversation” comes from Java Contexts and Dependency Injection (JSR 299) nee “Weld”
Flash: inspired by Ruby on Rails

accessible from EL or ExternalContext
useful for storing data for use on the “next” request
preserves FacesContext-messages across redirects

New Scopes

View: persists as long as user interacts with the same view

managed-beans can be put in view-scope

Custom Scopes

Project Stage

Inspired by Rails
Development

Better error reporting, debugging

Production

Better performance

Using JSF 2.0 Now

Project Mojarra

FCS in a few weeks
https://javaserverfaces.dev.java.net/

Color coded JavaDocs http://javaserverfaces.dev.java.net/docs/2.0/

New in 2.0
Changed in 2.0
Deprecated in 2.0 (JSP)

M

Blogs for more detail

http://andyschwartz.wordpress.com/2009/07/31/whats-new-in-jsf-2/
http://www.java.net/blogs/driscoll/
http://blogs.sun.com/rlubke/
http://www.java.net/blogs/edburns/
http://www.java.net/blogs/rogerk/

A Complete Tour of JSF 2

1 comments

Notes on slide 1

6 Favorites