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JSF 2.0 Faces Disjointed Components


Next version of JavaServer Faces aims to reduce configuration headaches

By Alex Handy
December 26, 2007 — 
Sometimes, the cure for one’s woes is a hard look in the mirror. JavaServer Faces is facing up to its own configuration problems with JSR 314, the specification for JSF 2.0.

The project, under the auspices of the Sun Microsystems-driven Java Community Process, already has five primary goals: make custom components much easier to develop, add first-class AJAX support, incorporate a page description language based on Facelets into the core JSF specification, reduce the required configuration, and provide for better compatibility among JSF component libraries from different vendors.

Roger Kitain, staff engineer at Sun, and Ed Burns, senior staff engineer, are co-specification leads on JSR 314. The pair hopes to make JSF a clearer path between the Web and the complicated back-end systems and capabilities Java provides. That effort will begin with the simplification of the configuration process for JSF applications.

“One of the problems people have had with JSF is that when they sit down and develop custom components with JSF, there are different things you have to [configure] in different areas,” Kitain said. “You have to remember these different areas to piece those together, like component render associations. We're looking to simplify all that by making fewer areas to keep track of when developing this stuff.”

That means adding in the ability to configure components inside of annotations. It also means having fewer XML files scattered around and consolidating configuration files in easier-to-find places, said Kitain.

For component developers, mixing and matching the capabilities of various JSF snippets has also been difficult, said Burns. “The reason [third-party components] are not playing well together is that the JSF 1.2 specification, and earlier, simply did not say what to do [when] loading…static resources like scripts or style sheets. It didn't say what to do for partial tree traversal via AJAX, nor for persistence. Each of those component libraries had to invent their own solutions to do that,” said Burns.

Kitain and Burns also stated that those components would need to be rewritten to work with JSF 2.0.

In a world where the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) has made Java-to-Web design as easy as pointing and clicking, Burns and Kitain remain confident that JSF 2.0 will still hold an important place in Java Web stacks.

“I think the usage model posed by GWT is very intriguing, but what I've seen by talking to customers is that they really can't afford to stay inside that intriguing but constrained toolkit Google provides. Right now, they have their RMI interaction where components can talk to POJOs [Plain Old Java Objects] on the server,” said Burns.

But when it comes to accessing the forthcoming Web Beans, or the Java persistence API, JSF will remain a stable and mature solution, he added. In fact, the forthcoming Web Beans specification, JSR 299, is closely tied to the JSF 2.0 specification. Burns and Kitain said that this will allow JSF to interact more easily with the Java Persistence API and other heavyweight Java processes and tools.

Perhaps the most significant change to JSF 2.0, however, is a piece that Burns and Kitain have already begun coding. “For the first time in Java EE, we'll have a concept of a software development life cycle. The developer can say, ‘Now I'm in debug mode, or development mode,' and the runtime will know that 'since the developer is telling me this, I can give advanced error messages and advanced stack traces.' If you set that flag to production mode, you'll see friendlier error messages,” said Burns.

JSF 2.0 should arrive as an early draft specification in the first part of next year. Beyond that, Kitain and Burns could not predict more specific timelines. JSR 314 is part of the larger effort toward Java EE 6, however, and it's hoped that the completed specification and reference implementation will arrive alongside that specification.


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