Notes on MyFaces

This page is a collection of notes on MyFaces. MyFaces is a Jakarta project run under the Apache umbrella to create an maintain a public implementation of the JavaServer Faces specification.

Important Web Pages

JavaServer Faces is specified by JSR-252. The specification is quite detailed and
doesn't give a lot of insight into how to use it. The Sun reference implementation is available at JSF.

MyFaces is an Apache Jakarta project. See http://myfaces.apache.org/.
This from the home page:

What is Java Server Faces (JSF)?

Java Server Faces is a new and upcoming web application framework that accomplishes the MVC paradigm. It is comparable to the well-known Struts Framework but has features and concepts that are beyond those of Struts - especially the component orientation.

Here are some notes on Oracles contributions:

Trinidad (or formal ADF Faces) refers to an open source code donation contributed by Oracle. The actual components are now licensed under the ASF license and can be used by the public. You can download the source for the components form the Apache Incubator SVN here. As the donation works its way through the incubation process and eventually merges with MyFaces.

Trinidad (or formal ADF Faces) comes with very high quality components, a dialog framework, as well as personalization and skinning capabilities. Trinidad features include: file upload support, client-side validation, partial rendering of a page (AJAX-style), data tables, hierarchical tables, color/date pickers, progress indicators, menu tabs/buttons, wizards, internationalization and accessibility. A complete list of the Trinidad components is available (here.) This project starts with more than 100 components which have already been documented and thoroughly tested.

MyFaces has a number of user examples. There is a lot of stuff available at http://www.irian.at/myfaces/home.jsf.
Besides looking at the general structure of these examples, they are not going serve all that well for Sakai purposes, because
Sakai adds additional contraints on how applications are invoked and run. (what these?)

Sakai also has examples of the Sakai Style Guide elements written for MyFaces in the JSF module.

Here's an interesting note from the FAQ:

Does MyFaces work with Tomcat 5.5?

Yes, Apache MyFaces works with Tomcat5.5. If you see a blank page in your browser, try to remove the JAR files jsp-2.0.jar and commons-el.jar of the folder WEB-INF/lib.

There is a wealth of documentation available on the MyFaces wiki site: http://wiki.apache.org/myfaces/.

Configuration Parameters

These are hard to dig out of the documentation. As near as I can tell, the following parameters are extensions to the core JSF specification:

Name	Values	Description
javax.faces.application.CONFIG_FILES or javax.faces.CONFIG_FILES	comma separated list	Comma separated list of URIs of additional faces config files. (e.g. /WEB-INF/my-config.xml) Attention: /WEB-INF/faces.config.xml is added automatically. See JSF 1.0 PRD2, 10.3.2
javax.faces.STATE_SAVING_METHOD	server
myfaces_allow_javascript or org.apache.myfaces.ALLOW_JAVASCRIPT	true or false	This parameter tells MyFaces if javascript code should be allowed in the rendered HTML output. If javascript is allowed, command_link anchors will have javascript code that submits the corresponding form. If javascript is not allowed, the state saving info and nested parameters will be added as url parameters. Default: "true"
org.apache.myfaces.PRETTY_HTML	true or false	If true, rendered HTML code will be formatted, so that it is "human readable". i.e. additional line separators and whitespace will be written, that do not influence the HTML code. Default: "true"
AddResourceClass	???
AddResourceClassFromServletContext	???
CurrentInstance	true or false
org.apache.myfaces.AUTO_SCROLL	true or false	If true, a javascript function will be rendered that is able to restore the former vertical scroll on every request. Convenient feature if you have pages with long lists and you do not want the browser page to always jump to the top if you trigger a link or button action that stays on the same page. Default: "false"
org.apache.myfaces.DETECT_JAVASCRIPT	true or false	This parameter tells MyFaces if javascript code should be allowed in the rendered HTML output. If javascript is allowed, command_link anchors will have javascript code that submits the corresponding form. If javascript is not allowed, the state saving info and nested parameters will be added as url parameters. Default: "false" Setting this param to true should be combined with STATE_SAVING_METHOD "server" for best results. This is an EXPERIMENTAL feature. You also have to enable the detector filter/filter mapping below to get JavaScript detection working.