Eclipse Web Tools Platform 3.0
New and Noteworthy

JavaServer Faces Tools

Completed enhancements to the Tag Registry and Component Tree Views

See here for information on Alternative View Handler support

Tag Registry View

The Tag Registry View allows a JSF user to browse the JSF tags declared in each project including information about what components, converters and validators they create at runtime.



Component Tree View

The Component Tree View allows a user to browse a design-time approximation of what a view (i.e. a JSP page or Facelet XHTML) will look like at runtime. This component tree will also be used by an increasing number of component-based features in the future.

Hyperlink support in WPE's Source tab

The Source tab of the Web Page Editor (WPE) supports Hyperlink on a Managed Bean variable, Managed Bean property and Managed Bean method referenced in the Expression Language(EL) of a tag-attribute. Users can (Ctrl+click) on the hyperlink to navigate to the source of the Managed Bean.

Hover Help support in WPE's Source tab

The Source tab of the Web Page Editor (WPE) provides Hover Help on all symbols defined in the Expression Language(EL) of a tag-attribute including references to Managed Beans and Resource Bundles.

Enhancements to Web Page Editor (WPE) Property Pages

The tabbed property pages in the Web Page Editor (WPE) have been enhanced. This change is important for adopters of the project. See Enhancements to WPE Property Pages for details.

Support for Apache MyFaces Trinidad

Apache MyFaces Trinidad tags are now supported in the Web Page Editor, in source editors, and in the Properties view.

Improvements to EL content assist and hover help

Thanks to Matthias Fuessel for providing improvements to our EL support:

New EL framework enhancements

Thanks to Xiaonan Jiang at IBM for driving new framework requirements and providing prototypes.

Decorative Variable and Property Resolvers

To better support the decorative nature of JSF variable and property resolvers, we have added the ability to register decorative design time resolvers to the default application manager. Decorative resolvers are called only if the runtime resolver that they are associated with is found in the configuration of the current web project. For more information see: here



Enhancements to symbol creation API

We have refactored several internal symbol creation methods and combined them with contributions by Matthias Fuessel and Xiaonan Jiang (IBM), to create a new set of extension points to simplify creation of common JSF symbols. See here for more details.

We have also made the symbol creation methods available on a new factory called JSFSymbolFactory.

New EL validation preferences

New validation preferences for EL validation problems allow you to change the severity of type assignment problems between Error, Warning and Ignore.