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Build Apache Geronimo applications using JavaServer Faces, Part 1: Use Eclipse and Apache MyFaces Core to build a basic application

How Geronimo developers can access the power of JavaServer Faces

Chris Herborth (chrish@pobox.com), Freelance, Freelance Writer

Chris Herborth is an award-winning senior technical writer with more than 10 years of experience writing about operating systems and programming. When he's not playing with his son Alex or hanging out with his wife Lynette, Chris spends his spare time designing, writing, and researching (that is, playing) video games.

Summary: JavaServer Faces (JSF) is a new Java™-based framework that makes it easier to build graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) applications. Similar to the popular Struts framework, but more component oriented, JSF defines a common set of application programmer interfaces (APIs) that represent user interface (UI) components, including state, event handling, input validation, internationalization (i18n), and accessibility. This tutorial series introduces Apache Geronimo developers to JSF and other related technologies.

View more content in this series

Date: 05 Sep 2006
Level: Intermediate
PDF: A4 and Letter (639 KB | 34 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®

Activity: 12049 views
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Before you start

This tutorial shows Java programmers how to build highly interactive Java EE applications for deployment on Apache Geronimo using the JSF components. The tutorial assumes you'll be using the Eclipse IDE as your development platform.

About this tutorial

This tutorial introduces Apache Geronimo, a pure Java EE application server, and the world of JSF by using the Eclipse IDE and Apache MyFaces (an open source implementation of the JSF framework). You'll develop the front end for the sign-up pages of a developer forum and learn how to use common input methods and data-validation techniques.

About this series

This tutorial is the first of a five-part series on building Apache Geronimo applications using JSF. The upcoming tutorials in the series include the following:

Part 2: Using Tomahawk with JavaServer Faces shows you how to integrate Apache Tomahawk components with your Geronimo application. Tomahawk provides several custom components that are 100% compatible with JSF.
Part 3: Using Ajax4jsf with JavaServer Faces demonstrates how to use Sun's Ajax4jsf tool to add Ajax capabilities to your Geronimo application.
Part 4: Extend JSF with Apache Trinidad components teaches you how to integrate components from Apache Trinidad, the open source version of ADF Faces, with your Geronimo application to enhance your JSF application's interface.
Part 5: Integrating your JSF Application with Spring shows you how to integrate your JSF applications with the Spring Framework, a popular framework that makes it easier for Geronimo developers to build Java EE applications.

System requirements

You need the following tools to follow along with this tutorial:

Geronimo, Apache's Java EE server project. Geronimo comes in Tomcat and Jetty flavors, depending on your needs. We used the Jetty flavor (version 1.1) because it's smaller.
MyFaces, Apache's JSF implementation. Download the core version (without Tomcat) from Apache. We used version 1.1.3 with this tutorial.
A blank MyFaces Web application. Download Marty Hall's jsf-blank-myfaces-minimal.zip archive from the coreservelets.com Web site. This archive contains an empty Web application that's nearly ready to go on Geronimo right out of the box, including the minimal MyFaces libraries required for a basic MyFaces application. Yes, you download the .jar files twice (once here, and once in the MyFaces core archive), but you need the MyFaces archive for documentation and any optional JARs you might be interested in.
Eclipse, the extensible open source IDE that supports a wide range of languages and platforms.
Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP), which adds support for XML and JavaScript editing, as well as preliminary JSF support, to Eclipse.
Java 1.4 or newer installed on your system. Eclipse binaries come with their own Java run time, but Geronimo and MyFaces don't (that would seriously bloat up the download archives). We use Java 1.5 on Mac OS X 10.4 in this tutorial, but the platform shouldn't matter. Get Java technology from Sun Microsystems or IBM® .