Its a bug: Facelets+MyFaces cannot serve UTF-8 and here is why!

[Randahl Fink Isaksen]

I finally found out why the combination of Facelets 1.1.11 and MyFaces 
1.1.4 makes it impossible to serve UTF-8. The problem is that they both 
expect each other to provide the encoding. First the FaceletViewHandler 
tries to make MyFaces decide which encoding to use by doing this:

       String encoding = null;
       ResponseWriter writer = renderKit.createResponseWriter(
               NullWriter.Instance, contentType, encoding);
       encoding = getResponseEncoding(context, 
writer.getCharacterEncoding());

For now, just notice here that createResponseWriter() is invoked with an 
encoding of null. In MyFaces the default render kit is HtmlRenderKitImpl 
and when Facelets call createResponseWriter() with a null encoding 
MyFaces responds by doing this:

       if(characterEncoding==null)
       {
           characterEncoding = HtmlRendererUtils.DEFAULT_CHAR_ENCODING;
       }

So MyFaces essentially says that if Facelets does not state explicetly 
which encoding it wants it just uses its default encoding, and 
DEFAULT_CHAR_ENCODING is in MyFaces equal to ISO-8859-1.

Now, back to the first code snippet - in the last line of the shown 
FaceletViewHandler code above a method called getResponseEncoding() is 
invoked and it contains this code:

       if (encoding == null) {
           encoding = "UTF-8";

This code will not have any effect because Facelets already invoked 
MyFaces with a null encoding which made MyFaces fall back to ISO-8859-1 
and thus the encoding is not null anymore.

So is this a MyFaces bug or a Facelets bug? In the code above Facelets 
deliberately chooses not to decide for a specific character encoding 
thereby expecting that

1. the JSF implementation provides the developer with means for 
specifying which character encoding he wants and that
2. the render kit provided by the JSF implementation will return this 
desired character encoding

This is in my opinion a wrong assumption - nothing in the JSF 
specification 1.1 says this is so. On the contrary the specification 
explicitly states that the encoding parameter is required when you 
invoke createReponseWriter, quote: "... the required value for the 
characterEncoding parameter for this method..." (section 8.1). So 
invoking createResponseWriter() with a null encoding is a violation of 
the specification, and thus I think this is a serious Facelets bug.

I sincerely hope the Facelets developers will comment on this. Thank you.

Randahl