A new release of the PrettyFaces JSF extension for Bookmarkable/Pretty URLs is now availible for download. This release includes several new features.

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What makes Pretty URLs in JSF so hard, and so slow?

Speed up development, reduce bandwidth, enhance user experience. This article gives a brief overview of JSF navigation, some of the problems, and potentially how to solve them by enabling bookmarkable, pretty URLs. Put simply… in my view, out of the box, JSF is a web framework designed for web-applications, not designed for web-sites. PrettyFaces addresses some of these issues.

Target audience for this article:

1. The reader is familiar with JSF navigation.
2. The reader is attempting to create a JSF app with bookmarkable “pretty” URLs. E.g.: …/mysite/archives/2008/11/11/
3. The reader is familiar with HTTP request/response at a basic level.

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Tutorial - Step By Step

If you’ve learned to use JSF Facelets to create on-the-fly, simple components using XHTML, then you probably have a whole slew of custom components that need to be copied between various projects, and can be somewhat painful to keep up to date. You may have tried to move them into a jar file, but Facelets can’t find them there (without some help from us.)

*The author of this article has requested feedback on the usability of this article. Please post questions, improvements, and/or comments.

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A4J:Form is missing several specified ajax functions

(View this issue on the JBoss tracker here. Keep reading, there is a fix… download fix)

The issue:

When using the a4j:form component, the data=”#{managedBean.property}” the properties defined in the data element list are supposed to be available after the a4j event in the data JavaScript variable; however, with <a4j:form> the attribute is not correctly causing the JavaScript data variable to be populated.
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