In Relation To

In the previous article we spoke about annoying issue of the Mojarra 2.0.0 PR when the empty attributes are rendered to the final html code. The issue was posted to the Mojarra project: https://javaserverfaces.dev.java.net/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=940

Every JSF component has some specific attribute set unique for it. At the same time, almost all UI components have attributes that are common for all of them. For example, onclick, ondblclick, onblur, onmouseover, onmouseout, onmousedown and so on. They are named PassThru because they are rendered one-to-one to the final html layout.

If you compare the look-n-feel of our new panel after step #2 and the one on the richfaces-demo, you can see one important difference. Our new panel misses the gradient in the header background.

As it was mentioned previously, rich:panel shows the header only if the facet name="header" is defined. Otherwise, it is just omitted.

When this blog is writing, JSF 2.0 specification reached the Public Review status. Everybody can visit the JSR-314 EG page and download his own copy of it. Comparing to JSF 1.2 when the implementation appeared about one year after the specification is done, Sun is developing the reference implementation, also known as Project Mojarra, at the time with writing the specification. Thus, you can try new features of JSF 2.0 right away downloading the Mojarra 2.0.0 PR release from the project home page: https://javaserverfaces.dev.java.net/ .

JSF 2.0 has some cool innovation features. One of them is PDL (Page Declaration Language). PDL inherits its core functionality from two well known JSF project - Facelets and JSFTemplates. Among all other features, it allows to create new JSF components in declarative manner, without creating a bunch of java classes like it was in the previous JSF versions. In this blog we will test-drive this feature and show the top features of PDL.

Binary Mojarra distribution already contains ezcomp00 and ezcomp01 applications that show the basic of the PDL. We are not going to repeat them, but will create something different. RichFaces has a rich:panel, pretty simple, but useful JSF component. It represents the rectangle with a body and an optional header defined by a facet. The look-n-feel of the rich:panel is defined with some set of css rules. Some of those rules refer to the parameters taken from the skin parameters. I.e. css has static and dynamically generated rules. If header presents, it is filled with background gradient generated by java class that also uses the skin parameters as base colors for generated gradient. The working example of the rich-panel you can see at the main richfaces demo at: http://livedemo.exadel.com/richfaces-demo/richfaces/panel.jsf

RichFaces 3.3.0.BETA1 has been deployed to: http://repository.jboss.org/maven2/org/richfaces/ui/richfaces-ui/3.3.0.BETA1/

We've started to build 3.2.2 betas.