The Example JavaServer Faces Application

The JavaServer Faces technology chapters of this tutorial primarily use a rewritten version of the Duke’s Bookstore example to illustrate the basic concepts of JavaServer Faces technology. This version of the Duke’s Bookstore example includes several JavaServer Faces technology features:

• The JavaServer Faces implementation provides FacesServlet, whose instances accept incoming requests and pass them to the implementation for processing. Therefore, the application does not need to include a servlet (such as the Dispatcher servlet) that processes request parameters and dispatches to application logic, as do the other versions of Duke’s Bookstore.

• A custom image map component that allows you to select the locale for the application.

• Navigation configured in a centralized application configuration resource file. This eliminates the need to calculate URLs, as other versions of the Duke’s Bookstore application must do.

• Backing beans associated with the pages. These beans hold the component data and perform other processing associated with the components. This processing includes handling the event generated when a user clicks a button or a hyperlink.

• The table that displays the books from the database and the shopping cart are rendered with the dataTable tag, which is used to dynamically render data in a table. The dataTable tag on tut-install/javaeetutorial5/examples/web/bookstore6/web/bookshowcart.jsp also includes input components.

• The table that displays the books from the database uses a c:forEach JSTL tag, demonstrating that you can easily use JavaServer Faces component tags with JSTL tags.

• A custom validator and a custom converter are registered on the credit card field of the bookcashier.jsp page.

• A value-change listener is registered on the Name field of bookcashier.jsp. This listener saves the name in a parameter so that tut-install/javaeetutorial5/examples/web/bookstore6/web/bookreceipt.jsp can access it.

This version of Duke’s Bookstore includes the same pages listed in Table 5–1. It also includes the tut-install/javaeetutorial5/examples/web/bookstore6/web/chooselocale.jsp page, which displays the custom image map that allows you to select the locale of the application. This page is displayed first and advances directly to the bookstore.jsp page after the locale is selected.

The packages of the Duke’s Bookstore application are:

• backing: Includes the backing bean classes

• components: Includes the custom UI component classes

• converters: Includes the custom converter class

• listeners: Includes the event handler and event listener classes

• model: Includes a model bean class

• renderers: Includes the custom renderers

• resources: Includes custom error messages for the custom converter and validator

• taglib: Includes custom tag handler classes

• util: Includes a message factory class

• validators: Includes a custom validator class

Chapter 12, Developing with JavaServer Faces Technology describes how to program backing beans, custom converters and validators, and event listeners. Chapter 13, Creating Custom UI Components describes how to program event handlers, custom components, renderers, and tag handlers.

The source code for the application is located in the tut-install/javaeetutorial5/examples/web/bookstore6/ directory.

To deploy and run the application using NetBeans IDE, follow these steps:

1. Perform all the operations described in Accessing Databases from Web Applications.

2. In NetBeans 5.5, select File->Open Project.

3. In the Open Project dialog, navigate to:

   tut-install/javaeetutorial5/examples/web/

4. Select the bookstore6 folder.

5. Select the Open as Main Project check box and the Open Required Projects check box.

6. Click Open Project.

7. In the Projects tab, right-click the bookstore6 project, and select Undeploy and Deploy.

8. To run the application, open the bookstore URL http://localhost:8080/bookstore6.

To deploy and run the application using Ant, follow these steps:

1. In a terminal window, go to tut-install/javaeetutorial5/examples/web/bookstore6/.

2. Type ant. This target will spawn any necessary compilations, copy files to the tut-install/javaeetutorial5/examples/web/bookstore6/build/ directory, and create a WAR file and copy it to the tut-install/javaeetutorial5/examples/web/bookstore6/dist/ directory.

3. Start the Application Server.

4. Perform all the operations described in Creating a Data Source in the Application Server.

5. To deploy the example, type ant deploy. The deploy target outputs a URL for running the application. Ignore this URL, and instead use the one shown in the next step.

6. To run the application, open the bookstore URL http://localhost:8080/bookstore6/.

To learn how to configure the example, refer to the web.xml file, which includes the following elements:

• A display-name element that specifies the name that tools use to identify the application.

• A context-param element that specifies that the javax.faces.STATE_SAVING_METHOD parameter has a value of client, meaning that state is saved on the client.

• A listener element that identifies the ContextListener class used to create and remove the database access.

• A servlet element that identifies the FacesServlet instance.

• A servlet-mapping element that maps FacesServlet to a URL pattern.

• Nested inside a jsp-config element is a jsp-property-group element, which sets the properties for the group of pages included in this version of Duke’s Bookstore. See Setting Properties for Groups of JSP Pages for more information.

To run the example, open the URL http://localhost:8080/bookstore6 in a browser.