Review of Chapter 2 of "Apache MyFaces 1.2 Web Application Development by Bart Kummel"

Posted on April 25, 2010 by rainwebs • 1 Comment

The second chapter is a bit like you may know it from my book. It describes the installation and use of important development tools and frameworks.

Getting Started

Bart chose Eclipse and JDeveloper for the IDE descriptions. Both IDE guides let me remember my first steps in JSF development. You do not get dedicated plugins from the vendor, namely Apache, but extensions developed by the community for Eclipse. The support for Trinidad in JDeveloper is more native.

One of the main limitations in both IDEs is a missing support for Thomahawk or Tobago when using the visual editor. However, visual editing like we know it from the desktop development IDEs is still a feature that you can not get within the JSF development.

You get a detailed and visualized introduction into the steps of creating a JSF project for both IDEs. JDeveloper let you recognize that there is a tighter integration with Trinidad and ADF Faces, the commercial implementation by Oracle, respectively.

Bart also gives some tips for using Maven as a build tool. He shows how to use Maven archetypes to create JSF project types.

Another important part in the configuration description is the use of application servers. He shows, for example, how to use MyFaces on Glassfish that delivers and uses the Sun JSF Reference Implementation by default.

Pretty important to JSF projects are the web.xml and the faces-config.xml. Bart describes the most important parts of those files so that you can manage your first project, for example, to add backing beans to it.

For short, this chapter helps to get an overview of how to configure your development environment and shows how to start a new project. One highlight of this chapter is the introduction of the Monster, inc. project. The book will develop an application that helps to report how good your scarer qualities are. If you are a monster that creates energy through scaring kids those reports could be important .