As a vocal blogger, I feel responsible for promoting and sharing the good work of others, whether that be technology, creative work, or in this case: a book. I will take no exception to that philosophy when it comes to the JavaServer Faces framework. For a quick read, try the summary. If you are intrigued, read on! I hope you find this review valuable.

PrettyFaces:

Version 1.2.3_GA: binary, source, documentation (stable) Minor Release: 20090415

1. Added optional <action onPostback=”false”> boolean flag to prevent action methods from being called on form postback. Defaults to true;
2. Added optional <query-param decode=”false”> to prevent java.net.URLDecode.decode() from being called on a specific managed query-parameter. Defaults to true;
3. Added unit tests for several critical classes.
4. Minor to moderate refactoring of PrettyFilter/PrettyContext

PrettyFaces:

Version 1.2.3_RC2: binary, source, documentation (stable) Minor Release: 20090331

1. Servlet forwards are working

PrettyFaces:

Version 1.2.3_RC1: binary, source, documentation (stable) Minor Release: 20090319

1. Managed query-params now accept multiple parameters of the same name: E.g.: String[] names — would accept a list of parameters (with the same name) from the request
2. Enhanced configuration loading — PrettyFaces now looks for /META-INF/pretty-config.xml by default, in addition to accepting a comma-separated list of user config-files in the web.xml init param: com.ocpsoft.pretty.CONFIG_FILES — submitted by Aleksei Valikov
3. JSP support for standard attributes on the pretty:link tag has been fixed. The pretty link will now accept style=’mystyle’ and other attributes — from Derek Hollis at OcpSoft

“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.

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

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.