It is amazing what can be done in exactly one year’s time.  January 17th will have been the 2nd anniversary since Lincoln Baxter and I started OcpSoft.  It’s been one seriously fun, and wild, ride with JavaServer Faces and the open-source community.  I want to take a moment to talk about my partner’s success story and what he has accomplished in just one short year.

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JSF2 is an amazing web-framework, and as part of our initiative to engage the community, Dan Allen, Andy Schwartz, Kito Mann, the rest of the Expert Group, and I have been putting together a “JSF Root Node” (as Ed Burns put it.) A website to be the first place people go to when they think of JSF.

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So, a little while ago I was attempting to use JSF’s Facelets <ui:repeat> tag, as a replacement for <h:dataTable>, but difficulty came when I needed to process actions on individual records of each row.

<ui:repeat> allows iteration over a List of Array[] of items, but it does not provide a method of discovering the “selected” or “actioned” row; there’s no way to discover the row the user is interacting with. Or is there?
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So, one of the best ways I know of to tell a user that they should be waiting for something to finish, is by setting the cursor to ‘wait’. It’s how desktop applications do it. It’s how the operating system does it… it’s how ajax should probably do it (if you want to solve the user wait interaction globally.)

With JSF2, it’s easy to accomplish!
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If you are manipulating any FacesContext when doing any kind of Sevlet Forwards – such as from a filter – you MUST release() any FacesContext you’ve created. The consequences of forgetting this are potentially dire. Read the rest of this entry »

So you’ve got Spring Security up and running. Great! Now you’ve got a login page, and you just added a form on the global page menu to allow users to Login from any public page. There’s just one problem. When they log-in from a public page, they’re redirected to the default-login-url! Your users will have to re-navigate to the page they were already viewing when they logged in, or maybe they’ll just use the much dreaded “Back” button. That’s not a good interaction, but we have a solution. Read the rest of this entry »

Several things that make life painful with Facelets are fixed with JSF2 & EzComp. Take a look at some of the nicer things to come:

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A correction has been made to the post: http://ocpsoft.com/java/acegi-spring-security-jsf-login-page/, fixing an issue where FacesMessages were not being displayed on failed authentications.
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Add a comment with your experience or “gotcha!”

Java Server Faces is currently full of relatively undocumented features and behavior. As part of the JSF2 release, OcpSoft is working with a few folks at Seam/Redhat to try to address these issues and provide better documentation.
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“The community was speaking, but until recently, nobody was listening.”

A lot has changed since May 15, 2001, when the first ballot review of the JSF 1.0 framework was just beginning. To this day, Sun’s flagship web-application framwork has been an uncompromising box of tricks and gotchas, with little community adoption. This has been mostly due to its relatively developer-unfriendly nature; however, the second phase is coming, and with JSF2.0 peeking out from the edge of its nest, a new life is beginning to show.

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