Using WebSphere Studio V5.1.1 to develop JSF applications

Part 1th: Creating JSF Web Projects and page templates

Over the past year, Java Server Faces is one of the most anticipated technologies for EE WEB development. With the release of the WebSphere Studio V5.1.1, the Java Server Faces has emerged. The Java Server Faces (JSF) provides an exciting visual development environment for the new development of Java EE Web applications. Without JSF, developers must write code that handles the interaction between almost all users and applications. Non-JSF WEB applications use HTML controls to handle user input, but because the HTML control itself does not have any "smart", developers must write code to handle all errors, input validation, string conversions and formatting, page flow, and so on. JSF is a UI framework that provides developers with these user interactions, which can greatly simplify the development of interactive WEB applications. The UI framework provided by JSF consists of UI components and runtimes, which are responsible for rendering these components to the client and managing the page's Lifecycle (errors, validators, navigation, and so on).

This article is the first of a series of articles, including 5 parts, designed to give readers hands-on experience with this exciting new feature. This series will include:

Part 1th: Create JSF Web projects and page templates.

Part 2nd: Create a JSF submission form.

Part 3rd: Create a JSF application that accesses data through the WEB data Objects (Wdo, which will soon become the Sdo:service data Objects).

Part 4: Integrating JSF applications with the Enterprise Java Bean using the Action handlers and JavaBean Data components.

Part 5th: Create a JSF Web service client using the Web Services Proxy component.

These exercises will showcase JSF's rapid application development (RAPID application Development,rad) features. With the WebSphere Studio Web perspective, developers can simply drag the faces component onto the JSP page. These controls are so rich that developers do not need to know Java to build JSF applications.

In this article, we will create a JSF Web project and design a page template with the faces component. Page templates provide a simple way to achieve the same style of application across multiple Web pages. All five parts of this series are interrelated. Readers should be familiar with WebSphere Studio and develop JSP applications. The material in this article can be downloaded from the bottom of the article.

Because the JSF specification is not yet the final version, the JSF tools in the WebSphere Studio V5.1.1 are provided as technical previews only. Application product development should only be done if the JSF specification is finalized and IBM has released the version of WebSphere Studio that supports the specification.

Creating a JSF Web project

In this section, we will create the Web project and make it Support JSF, which will add all the required libraries to our web project.

Open WebSphere Studio.

Start the WebSphere Studio application Developer Version 5.1.1. If you disable the text box feature, you can set it by setting the-setworkspace parameter at the command line.

Sets the directory to C:\JSFLab\workspace. Go to the Java EE perspective.

Now we're going to create the WEB application. During the creation process, we will enable application support for JSF development.

Go to the Java hierarchy view. Right-click the Web modules and select New => Dynamic Web Project. (Figure 1)

Figure 1. Creating a Web Project

This opens the Dynamic Web Project Wizard. For Project Name, enter PERSONALTRADEJSF. Click Configure advanced options and select Next. (Figure 2)

Figure 2. Configure advanced Options