Magnus K Karlsson: Getting Started with JSF 2.0 (EE 6)

June 27, 2017

Getting Started with JSF 2.0 (EE 6)

Introduction

JSF 2.0 is the standard Web Framework that ships with Java EE 6. Here I will build a simple JSF web app to get you started with the build stones.

Maven

With starting with Java EE 6, there is a ONE dependency for all Java EE, namely javax:javaee-api:[6.0|7.0]. A basic pom.xml file for Java EE 6 is.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">

    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
    <groupId>se.magnuskkarlsson.examples</groupId>
    <artifactId>example-jsf20</artifactId>
    <version>1.0.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
    <packaging>war</packaging>

    <properties>
        <project.build.sourceEncoding>UTF-8</project.build.sourceEncoding>
        <project.build.outputEncoding>UTF-8</project.build.outputEncoding>
        <maven.compiler.source>1.8</maven.compiler.source>
        <maven.compiler.target>1.8</maven.compiler.target>
        <failOnMissingWebXml>false</failOnMissingWebXml>
    </properties>

    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>javax</groupId>
            <artifactId>javaee-api</artifactId>
            <version>6.0</version>
            <scope>provided</scope>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>

    <build>
        <finalName>${project.artifactId}</finalName>
    </build>
</project>

Deployment Descriptors

Starting with EE 6 the web.xml is no longer compulsory, so here we will skip it.

A new feature in JSF 2.0, is that you do not need to declare navigation in the faces-config.xml, but you need to declare. That is the same thing with CDI. To enable CDI you need to have beans.xml. So we have to deployment descriptors.

WEB-INF/faces-config.xml
WEB-INF/beans.xml

Another feature in JSF 2.0, is that you can use ordinary CDI annotation instead of JSF specific. This makes one thing less to remember.

So instead of @javax.faces.bean.ManagedBean we can use @javax.inject.Named.

And instead of @javax.faces.bean.RequestScoped we can use @javax.enterprise.context.RequestScoped.

So a simple request scope baking bean for JSF is.

package se.magnuskkarlsson.example.jsf;

import javax.enterprise.context.RequestScoped;
import javax.inject.Named;

@Named
@RequestScoped
// Shorthand for @Named and @RequestScoped is @javax.enterprise.inject.Model
public class UserBean {

    private String name;

    public String getMessage() {
        return (name != null) ? "Hello " + name : null;
    }

    public String getName() {
        return name;
    }

    public void setName(String name) {
        this.name = name;
    }

}

And finally our simple hello JSF page. Notice the commandButton and action, it points to JSF page hello, i.e. to the page itself.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
    xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core"
    xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html">

<h:head>
    <title>Example JSF 2.0 Hello</title>
</h:head>
<h:body>
    <h:form>
        <h:outputLabel value="What is your name?" for="name" />
        <h:inputText id="name" value="${userBean.name}" />
        <h:commandButton value="Submit" action="hello" />
    </h:form>
    <p>
        <h:outputText value="${userBean.message}"
            rendered="${not empty userBean.message}" />
    </p>
</h:body>
</html>

Now build and deploy it to e.g. JBoss EAP 6, the app is accessible from either

http://localhost:8080/example-jsf20-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT/hello.jsf

http://localhost:8080/example-jsf20-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT/faces/hello.xhtml

June 27, 2017

Getting Started with JSF 2.0 (EE 6)

Introduction

Maven

Deployment Descriptors

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