Hi,
I've been looking into different ways to partially refresh a JSF page
(actually a Facelets page) to get more responsive components (datagrids,
etc.), and have come up with a few options. Thought I'd see if anyone
on this list had strong opinions on one versus the others. I'm willing
to do client-side JS if necessary, but ideally the solution would be as
simple as adding an attribute in a JSF-ish tag.
Here's what I've found:
1) ADF Faces. Jacob Hookom did a blog entry in September with the
following code snippet from Oracle's ADF:
<af:commandButton action="#{bean.method}" partialSubmit="true"/>
<af:commandButton text="Refresh Some Things" partialSubmit="true" id="refresh"/>
<af:outputText value="#{oneValue}" partialTriggers="refresh"/>
<af:outputText value="#{anotherValue}" partialTriggers="refresh otherRefresh"/>
This is exactly what I'm looking for (assuming there are <af:datagrid,
af:xxx> components for all the regular components), but I wasn't sure
whether or not the donated Oracle components include this partial
refresh capability. I've heard some components are only available in
the commercial release ... is this one of them?
2) ajaxanywhere <http://ajaxanywhere.sourceforge.net/>. A pretty clean
way to designate parts of the page to refresh. This project looks like
an option, but it does seem like triggering the partial refresh requires
you to call an ajaxanywhere-specific JS function--which is not a
dealbreaker, but "less nice" than the ADF method. My sense is I could
definitely make this work if the other two options aren't feasible yet.
3) JSF Avatar. Not much info out there about Avatar, but it seems to be
a Sun-powered extension of JSF that allows you to designate a
ProcessingContext, so that JSF can organically create just the
components that're asked for by an AJAX request. This one is
conceptually appealing, but it seems very nascent and I'm not sure how
usable it is. (only available in a Glassfish container? I need
something I can drop into Tomcat or Resin) I've read that the
server-side piece is implemented somewhere at Sun, and I'd be willing to
homebrew the client piece if necessary. Has anybody here actually used
Avatar? Do the Blueprints examples use Avatar? (haven't looked yet)
I know about some others (ajax tags, some jhook plan on the horizon for
a custom partial-page rendering engine), but these seem like the most
practical options for a project migrating to JSF today.
Only other requirement is that it works in Facelets. I'm even willing
to switch to RI (I know, I know- it's a MyFaces list) if that's required
for Avatar.
Any thoughts would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance-
Rogers
