Thanks Jonas, that's great news. I've got the zip here
<http://wiki.apache.org/myfaces/adfproposal> and am going to give it a
shot. Is Facelets supported baked into that archive (the one from
wiki.apache/myFaces) somewhere, or do I need a separate jar to get ADF
tags working in .xhtml files?
on a side note- I just realized the book I preordered a couple days ago
is yours. Hope it's good! :-)
Jonas Jacobi wrote:
Hi Rogers,
The donation includes this functionality. The parts that are available
in the commercial solution (and not in the donation) are RenderKits
for Wireless and Telnet.
Partial Page Rendering should work out of the box :)
Thanks,
Jonas
Rogers Reilly wrote:
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
--
*Jonas Jacobi
Author*: Pro JSF and Ajax: Building Rich Internet Components
<http://apress.com/book/bookDisplay.html?bID=10044>
*Blog*: http://www.orablogs.com/jjacobi
