Decided against MyFaces - going with sun's RI

[jack catler]

Not sure if I am doing the right thing, but after installing and playing around with the cardemo application with the Sun's RI on tomcat 5.5.1.4, I tried converting over to MyFaces with 'lots' of problems....could not really get it to work. Followed their instructions - which contradict themselves in a number of places depending on the 'exact' version of 5.5.x you are using.....

Played around with it all day and reading the MyFaces 'tips' all on their website, seems to me there are too many 'config' issues to worry about.

Has anyone else come to the same conclusion?

It is perhaps a sympton of the cardemo itself ?

[Gregg Bolinger]

I haven't touched the cardemo but I have had nothing but good experience with MyFaces and their Mailing List is a great source for information about MyFaces specific issues. We try and help out as much as possible here but the MyFaces devs don't hang out on Javaranch. I think we do pretty good.

There is quite a bit of config that goes into web.xml for MyFaces but if you look carefully there is also a lot of power in that config and in MyFaces. A lot you don't have to worry about. All I ever do is extract their simple.war and copy the web.xml from that app into my own. If anything does change, it's just adding my own entries into web.xml that have nothing to do with MyFaces. The defauls generally work just fine and dandy.

What kinds of problems did you experience?

[jack catler]

Hi Greg,

I'm sure what you say it true.

But I had the cardemo working 'out of the box' with RI.
I then followed the instructions on the MyFaces site to move over to MyFaces.

It had all sorts of issues with the Config classes (can't remember exact error) now, but I am sure as you say it was a configuration issue.

The problem is there are a lot of very finer points on the myfaces and Wiki website about what you should do based on the 'exact' minor version of tomcat (pre 5.5.9 and post 5.5.9) and so on, I tried it for a while and gave up....some of this information contradicts but also is quite scattered and I gave up as even if it worked in the end I would have forgotten all the config changes I made.... ;-)

I may try it again at some point...but not for now....it would be nice if myfaces produced a clear hitlist of what to do...

Thanks for your comments...

[Daniel Rhoades]

Same here couldn't get MyFaces working on JBoss AS 4 (even after following the wiki) - but I did on a standalone Tomcat install...

The trouble is with JSF error messages is that they are so spurious that you have virtually no chance of debugging the problem!

[Tim Holloway]

Unless they've done something in the last 6 months, the Sun RI is seriously broken and abandoned. I don't remember the details, but I think I ran into a problem where message resources weren't being resolved and the available source code couldn't be used to build a repaired version of the RI.

The Sun RI is a minimal implementation never really intended for industrial-grade use. If MyFaces isn't cutting it, maybe something like Oracle's ADF Faces will do.

[Alexander Jesse]

Well...

RI: The RI-team is busy keeping up with the 1.2 Expert Group doing the 1.2 release
MyFaces: The versions after 1.1.0 are definitely better than the older ones

IBM: has no implementation of their own. They use the RI
Oracle: ADFFaces is NO implementation of its own. It is just a component kit (although a great one)

MyFaces has some advantages in the performance area over the RI. The support in the MyFaces Mailing list to me seems better than the Sun-forum...
And when needed... come online on irc://irc.freenode.net##jsf

hth
Alexander

PS: I did a big project using the RI, but for the next I tend to switch to MyFaces

[Angus Rose]

I have had big problems getting myfaces to work in OC4J and have found nothing to point me in the right direction - not even the Oracle site can tell me how to configure OC4J to work with JSF/ADF or MyFaces even though they work problem-free in the embedded server that comes with JDeveloper.

Have they been released too early - there's too much hype based around them and not enough tutorials to make them a viable option for a serious project

[Alexander Jesse]

You made me curious...

- I downloaded Oracle Application Server 10g (9.0.4.0.0) and installed it.
- I downloaded MyFaces 1.1.1 (including the samples)
- I unpacked the simple.war to J2EE_HOME/applications
- I added jsp-2.0.jar and jstl.jar to J2EE_HOME/applications/simple/WEB-INF/lib
(necessary because oc4j is not yet a J2EE 1.4 container)
- I added the listener (between filter-mapping and servlet) to the web.xml
as described in (http://wiki.apache.org/myfaces/Installation_and_Configuration) at the bottom (Other Containers)
- I configured the web-app by
see (http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jdev/htdocs/partners/addins/exchange/jsf/doc/installation.html) Demo.war deployment to oc4j standalone
- application.xml
<web-module id="simple" path="../../home/applications/simple" />
<library path="---path-to-tools.jar---" />
- http-web-site.xml
<web-app application="default" name="simple" root="/simple" />
- restarted oc4j
- called http://localhost:8888/simple/index.jsp
AND
played around with the sample-webapp of MyFaces

All this took me about 30 minutes. I have never ever before deployed a
webapp to oc4j. I just used the oc4j installation guide and one google-query
(install myfaces on oc4j) which found as first doc the link to the
demo.war-deployment cited above.

I'd say: no magic here. Juts 2 Oracle and 1 MyFaces doc to read

hth
Alexander

PS: I'm downloading the version 10 to see whether the same preocedure works there too ;-)

PPS: The info above is now also in the MyFaces-wiki page

PPPS: version 10 does not need the jsp-2.0.jar and the jstl.jar, the rest can be copied over
[ January 13, 2006: Message edited by: Alexander Jesse ]

[Mathew Sam]

We have the web application based on Sun JSF 1.1 Reference Implementation. We would like to migrate this application on MyFaces. Application is developed using WSAD. Currently, in the web application some of the classes from com.sun.faces.util packages are used and are not recognized when it is migrated to MyFaces. Can anybody suggests the package in MyFaces which implements the similiar functionality as in com.sun.faces.util ?

[Mathew Sam]

We have the web application based on Sun JSF 1.1 Reference Implementation. We would like to migrate this application on MyFaces. Application is developed using WSAD. Currently, in the web application some of the classes from com.sun.faces.util packages are used and are not recognized when it is migrated to MyFaces. Can anybody suggests the package in MyFaces which implements the similiar functionality as in com.sun.faces.util ?

[Alexander Jesse]

Depends on which class you use...

com.sun.faces.util.Base64 -> org.apache.commons.codec.binary.Base64
com.sun.faces.util.ConstantMethodBinding -> does not exist
com.sun.faces.util.DebugUtil -> org.apache.myfaces.util.DebugUtils
com.sun.faces.util.HtmlUtils -> org.apache.myfaces.renderkit.html.HtmlRendererUtils
com.sun.faces.util.InstancePool -> unknown
com.sun.faces.util.JSFBitSet -> unknown
com.sun.faces.util.MessageFactory -> org.apache.myfaces.util.MessageUtils
com.sun.faces.util.TreeStructure -> unknown
com.sun.faces.util.Util -> unknown, partially HtmlRendererUtils

ConstantMethodBinding: Google around, or use the sample from the books...

hth
Alexander