The Definitive Guide to Apache MyFaces and Facelets (Paperback)

~ (Author), Martin Marinschek (Author), (Author), (Author)
Key Phrases: managed bean class, reference implementation, antipatterns and pitfalls, Faces Servlet, Sun Microsystems, Last Name (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

The Definitive Guide to Apache MyFaces and Facelets is an ideal reference if youre looking to develop real–world applications with the open source lightweight Apache MyFaces and Dojo (the Ajax API). The book focuses less on theory and more on aspects like scalability, design, optimization, and configurability.

This book emphasizes meeting real–world requirements for performance and scalability. It includes lucid code samples that reflect the pattern being described. The “In the Trenches” sections in each chapter give you advice and recommendations based on actual experiences with each pattern. What’s more, the “Extreme Extensions” section at the end of each relevant chapter is dedicated to a “freestyle” expression of taking a particular pattern or set of patterns to the max. (This is a great way for you to learn because of the magnification effect.) This is also the first book to embrace the Dojo framework for Ajax (soon to be an Apache project).

About the Author

Zubin Wadia has seven years of experience in JEE and .NET technologies. His experiences with enterprise content management, workflow, imaging, compression, and security allow him to appreciate a powerful framework that offers a high-degree of flexibility and efficiency. In 2005, Zubin designed and deployed an award–winning solution for a criminal justice agency in the government space leveraging next–generation technologies such as Ajax, Hibernate, Spring, BPEL, and, of course, MyFaces. His current focus is on architecting an enterprise–wide Contract Management platform for the NYC Department of Health. Zubin is CTO at ImageWork Technologies, a leading Government Systems Integrator on the East Coast.

Martin Marinschek has eight years of experience in JEE and open source technologies. He is a MyFaces PMC member and a popular speaker at major open source events such as JavaPolis and ApacheCon. Martin brings dynamism, experience, and innovation to the MyFaces project. Martin is the co-CEO of Irian, a fast-growing consulting company focused on providing JSF solutions to customers.

Hazem Saleh has four years of experience in JEE and open source technologies. He is a MyFaces committer. He is the initiator of many components in MyFaces Tomahawk sandbox such as CAPTCHA, pdfExport, media, passwordStrength and others. He is also a yui4jsf committer. He is now working for IBM Egypt as a staff engineer.

Dennis Byrne works for ThoughtWorks, a global consultancy with a focus on end–to–end agile software development of mission critical systems. Dennis is a committer and PMC member for Apache Myfaces. He is also an experienced public speaker and a committer for JBoss JSFUnit.

Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Apress; New edition (September 22, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590597370
• ISBN-13: 978-1590597378
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #277,160 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A winning combination of technologies, September 29, 2008

By	Damodar Chetty (Minnesota, US [www.swengsol.com]) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

While most existing JSF books focus on teaching readers how to use the Faces framework, this book instead looks specifically at Facelets and the component libraries within the Apache MyFaces project, viz. Tomahawk, Trinidad, Orchestra, and Tobago.

After spending a weekend with this book, here are my impressions:

* The book is fairly short, and so seems very diminutive when stacked up against other books on JSF. You can imagine reading this from cover to cover over a long weekend.

* With four main authors, and six contributing authors, this book reads like a series of articles on JSF. Fortunately, the articles are well written for the most part, and you can read the chapters out of order without loss of continuity.


MyFaces Core:
=============
The chapter on MyFaces Core (the actual JSF implementation) is only about 20 pages long. So while it works as a decent refresher, it is absolutely not a first introduction to JSF. I suspect newcomers to JSF will find this book rather daunting unless they've already read some of the other excellent books on Faces (see my review for Kito Mann's JSF in Action.)

Tomahawk:
=========
This chapter is very well written and focuses on some important components (like tree2, schedule, inputCalendar, etc.) The explanations are clear enough to make you feel you should be able to get these working after a reading. However, I was disappointed to find marginal treatment of the t:saveState component - especially as there are multiple references to it in other chapters (as in the discussion of Orchestra, and in JSF pitfalls).
. . . . . .
As an aside, this book's index is the gold standard for tech books - about 30 pages for a 285 page book. When I went looking for saveState, for example, I was able to quickly zero in on all its references.
. . . . . .

Facelets:
=========
I got a strange sense of deja vu when I read the chapter on Facelets - turns out it is lifted almost verbatim from APress's Facelets Essentials - along with the surreal Bird Store example. If you have read that book, you won't find many surprises here. This chapter and its Facelets appendix take up 58 pages which turns out to be over two thirds of the content of that other book. Fortunately its the best two thirds - so you really get two books in one here.
. . . . . .
What really bothered me is that most of the examples in this book use JSP as the presentation technology. If Facelets is really worthy of having a mention on the title, I'd have expected to see more real world usage throughout the book.

So why not drink the KoolAid?
. . . . . .
Misc projects:
==============
A common problem I had with the other chapters was that the examples were too short to be of much use.

For instance, the example for pageFlowScope is too trivial to convincingly demonstrate why it is useful. It provides nothing more than a description of the mechanical aspects of using this scope. I'd have loved to see a working example that exemplified how it avoided the weaknesses of the request and session scopes.

[To fully grasp the actual meat of this particular topic, I highly recommend reading about Tomahawk's saveState, Trinidad's pageFlowScope, and Orchestra's conversation scope - all in one sitting. These are all different solutions to the same core issue - so they're best read together. The discussion in Orchestra's chapter is by far the best - esp. see Page 175 - Managing Independent Windows, and page 194 - Orchestra's Architecture.]


Antipatterns:
=============
The chapter on JSF Antipatterns is a very interesting read. A few of these antipatterns seem like spectacularly bad ideas to begin with and you wonder how they passed design reviews in the first place. However, there are a lot of practical usage tips here (such as thread safety issues with custom validators and converters) that made it worth my time.


Appendices:
===========
The information on dependency injection with Spring is confined to about a paragraph - so a better choice is Spring Recipes by Gary Mak. The appendix on view state encryption is also a useful addition.

Conclusion:
===========
This book was long overdue - and is well worth your time if you are into using the MyFaces sub-projects. Throw in Facelets and you have a winning combination.


Damodar Chetty
swengsol.com

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good Start if you want to use MyFaces, March 3, 2009

By	Suhas Valanjoo "Suhaas The Critic" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I am working on a project that uses Spring, Hibernate and JSF. MyFaces is an excellent example of open source implementation of a specification like JSF. This book was very helpful in understanding the core concepts of JSF and expoliting the power of MyFaces.

After the introductory session on JSF, the book delves into individual projects of MyFaces. Individual chapters cover various tag libraries from MyFaces , namely, Tomahawk, Trinidad, Tobago and Orchestra. The beauty of JSF is that you can pick and choose tags from any libraries (as long as you put the relevant jar in your classpath :-) )

I just attended a lecture by David Geary, who is part of the committee that drives the specification for JSF 2.0, He mentioned that from JSF 2.0 onwards, Facelets would become an integral part of the specification (so Bye, Bye JSP :-) ). JSF 2.0 would be out by mid-year this year. So if you want to prepare yourself for that change this is a very good book, too.

Even if you have an implemented your project already, this would come in handy as a good reference. A section on anti-patterns covers anti-patterns in the areas of Thread Safety, PhaseListener, Static Typing etc. Authors seem to have given a thorough treatment and done justice to these to[pics, that are usually ignored in a real-life web applicaiton project.

In summary, a Thumbs up and 5 star rating for this book.

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, June 30, 2009

By	Brent Clay "Author, Faith Without Nonsense" - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

Other reviewers have already done a very thorough job of addressing many of the relevant points about this book, so I will not reiterate them. Still, I wanted to chime in with a good word since I think the book is well deserving of it.

Well done. I recommend this book.