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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.

“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.

It didn’t make it…

Well folks, for those of you who were hoping JSF 2.0 would contain the URL rewriting tools that many had asked for, unfortunately it looks like it’s not going to make it into the official spec. Bookmarking a page, or pages in JSF has been a heavily requested feature, but according to this discussion, is currently out of scope.

But that’s ok…

The PrettyFaces JSF Bookmark extension has been updated for JSF 2.0, and is ready for public preview (download below).

The Problem:

So you need a way to instantiate the 2.0 FacesContext in a Filter, but when you use the same method that you have in the past, you get NullPointerExceptions all over the place when attempting to access any values through El. The ScopedAttributeElResolver bombs when attempting to set values or access methods in backing beans.) It’s not too hard to get this working again. In fact, this is how our own URL-rewrite filter for JSF handles things behind the scenes.

A new major release of the PrettyFaces JSF extension for Bookmarkable/Pretty URLs is now available for download.

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

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 most 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.

We’ve gotten a good number of comments from Lincoln’s latest post on Spring Security and JSF.  A few comments have asked for further code samples on how to get this example working. We created a runnable project for this example, and it can be downloaded here.

Tutorials – What a nightmare

Everyone seems to be going through hell to get a fully functional JSF login page working with Spring Security (formerly Acegi,) and yes, I did too, but there’s an EASY way to make this happen. And get this:

• It takes just five clear and well written lines of Java code.

First, the solution. Afterwards, the dirty details. (Spring 2.5.2 was used for this example, but this documentation is still relevant for Spring 3.x) You can find a downloadable working example here. There is also a followup article on post-authentication redirecting, here.

Very Simple

In a JSF Reference Implementation, passing global faces messages between pages doesn’t work. It’s not designed that way “out of the box.” Fortunately there is a way to do this, which will even support redirects between pages, forwards through a RequestDispatcher, and also through standard JSF navigation cases.

There is a 5 minute solution to this problem.