Another one of those long traveling days right before weekend. I am sitting in the train and have a look at a new book I got from Packt for reviewing: “Apache MyFaces 1.2 Web Application Development” by Bart Kummel. As this book is a pretty new publication I start this review in parallel .

MyFaces implements the JSF standards 1.1 and 1.2. The team is also near a complete JSF 2.0 support. So, we soon will have the base to use our component frameworks, like ICEfaces 2.0, in production.

Sure, you can have the Sun RI already. But, the Apache stuff was always a bit cooler to me. Bart, for example, mentions that the messages you get are much more detailed. This is pretty important during development to find those litte bugs that are hidden inside of looooooong exception stacks. You may guess it.

Introduction

The first chapter of the book gives a short overview of all the important JSF projects that are hosted at the Apache Foundation. Over the years different vendors and consulting companies donated a lot of stuff. So, today there is choice, even if you use Apache open source products only.

Although the chapter gives a good overview of all Apache JSF projects you can not expect a detailed discussion of all of them in the following chapters. Some projects are still in alpha state of their development, others are not as important as you may think. If we have a look at Tobago, for example, Bart mentions that there is no room left in the book. But, for me it is clear why he skipped Tobago. It never got the market share to be an important JSF component framework like Tomahawk. Even Tomahawk is not as much important as Trinidad to me today.

Trinidad is a donation by Oracle (or is it Oracle/Sun now?). It it the open source part of their commercial ADF Faces. For all of you that have a heavy database backend, a lot of us will have for sure, it delivers pretty cool stuff for fast database-like presentations. It is maybe not comparable to what Borland did with Delphi those days on Windows. But, if I have a look at all JSF component frameworks it seems to be the most comparable one. Maybe the visual editor qualities in Delphi will be missing in the end.

The next chapter will discuss the configuration and use of IDEs to use the Apache frameworks.

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