JSF Facelets Tools Proposal

JavaServer Faces(JSF) Facelets Tools is a proposed open source component under the Eclipse WTP JSF Tools subproject.

This component proposal is similar to a Project Proposal (as defined in the Eclipse Development Process document) and is written to declare its intent and scope. This proposal is written to solicit additional participation and input from the Eclipse community.

Comments can be made in bug 214949.

Background

The JSF Tools project provides an extensible framework and exemplary tools to simplify the development of JSF applications in Eclipse. The JSP source editor can be used for this purpose. However, this feature works only for JSF pages that use JSP as the view handler. Content Assist and Validation are other significant features in the JSF Tools project available only for a JSF-JSP page. Facelets is a more performing and popular view handler that uses XHTML syntax to define a JSF page. The released version of the JSF tools project doesn't support Facelets.

Project Goal

The objective of this incubating project is to enable the current set of features in the JSF Tools project to support Facelets. Since Facelets is not part of the current JSF specification, this work is being done as an incubating project. The next release of the JSF Specification, JSF 2.0 (JSR-314), will have a support for a Facelet-like view handler. The work done in this project will make it possible to provide feedback to the JSF 2.0 specification expert group and hence its essential to start early.

Scope

The JSF Facelets Tools project will enable the current features of the JSF Tools Project in a dynamic web project for Facelets.

Proposal

Following are the list of features that will be supported for Facelets

1. Create a Dynamic Web Project configured for Facelets
   • Provide a WTP-Facet called, JSF Facelet, that can be added to a Dynamic Web Project that has a JSF Facet.
   • Configure the application configuration resource file, faces-config.xml, to set com.sun.facelets.FaceletViewHandler as the view handler
   • Configure the web.xml file to define *.xhtml as the view definition document file by setting the initialization parameter, javax.faces.DEFAULT_SUFFIX to *.xhtml
   • Add Facelets Tag libraries to the project
2. Register a Facelets Tag Library
3. Create a Facelets template page
4. Create a XHTML web page enabled to define a Facelet page
   • Add the Facelets namespace to the page
   • Support creation of the page based on a Facelets template
5. Edit a Facelets Web Page in the Structured Source Editor
   • Recognize all the Facelets tag libraries in the project defined by
     • A taglib.xml file in the project search path (as defined by Facelets).
     • Defined in the web.xml file using the initialization parameter facelets.LIBRARIES
   • Provide Content Assist for all the registered tags and their attributes
   • Provide validation for all the registered tags and their attributes
   • Provide Content Assist, Validation, Hyperlink and HoverHelp support for Expression Language in XHTML files.
6. Execute a Facelets Page on a target runtime web server

Contributions

Tentative Plan

First Technology Preview Milestone will be available by July, 2008

Component Lead/Committer

1. Raghu Srinivasan

Committers

1. Cameron Bateman
2. Gerry Kessler
3. Ian Trimble

User community

Related Bugs