Configuration

Setting up PrettyFaces is simple.

Configuration

Setting up PrettyFaces is simple.

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.

“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.

Maven JSF users can be relieved, PrettyFaces is now in the Maven central repository: To include PrettyFaces in a Maven project, add the following dependency to your POM.

<dependency> <groupId>com.ocpsoft</groupId> <artifactId>ocpsoft-pretty-faces</artifactId> <version>{version}</version> </dependency>

Special thanks to Ryan DeLaplante at http://www.ryandelaplante.com for helping me get this set up! He wrote the initial POM and helped me to get started learning Maven… now I’m hooked.

A new minor release of the PrettyFaces JSF extension for Bookmarkable/Pretty URLs is now available for download. PrettyFaces is now backwards compatible with Java 5. Version 1.2.2: binary, source

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.

The only thing that stays the same, in our field of Computer Science, is change itself. Do not try to predict what will happen in the future; instead know that the future will bring change, and that you will need to adapt to it.

Design systems which are capable of change, and you will be much more ready for the future.