ICEfaces™ V1.5 Release Notes November 13th, 2006

Overview

• Understanding ICEfaces
• Changes in this release
• Supported browsers, application servers, and tools
• Known issues with this release
• Getting support for ICEfaces
• License information

Understanding ICEfaces

ICEfaces delivers extensions to Java ServerFaces (JSF) that provide an AJAX-enabled rich presentation environment for JSF applications. ICEfaces brings value to any J2EE development project that needs to provide superior presentation capabilities to the web application user. In particular, ICEfaces provides the following features:

• Smooth, incremental page updates that do not require a full page refresh to achieve presentation changes in the application.
• Server-initiated asynchronous presentation updates for dynamic instantaneous data push.
• The ICEfaces Component Suite, a complete rich JSF component suite that fully leverages ICEfaces capabilities.
• Intelligent form processing that facilitates fine-grained interactions with the user as they manipulate a form.
• API support for rapid development of group-aware and collaborative applications, such as Chat, Webcast, social apps., etc.
• JSP or Facelets based development.
• Tool integrations for leading Java IDEs.
  

Learn More

This ICEfaces release comes with extensive documentation that will help you understand the product thoroughly. Documentation for this release is located in your installation directory at .../install_dir/ICEfaces-1.5/icefaces/docs/. The following documents are provided in PDF format:

1. ICEfaces Getting Started Guide: This guide takes you through product installation, environment configuration, demo app installation, and a basic 5-stage tutorial. This guide also contains information related to support for different application server environments and development tools.
2. ICEfaces Developer's Guide: This guide contains information relevant to developing applications with ICEfaces. It describes the ICEfaces architecture, and explains key concepts that the ICEfaces developer should be aware of. It also provides a complete reference guide that covers APIs, configuration, components (including the ICEfaces Component Suite) and TLDs, and covers advanced topics like server-initiated rendering.

Additionally, all ICEfaces documentation is also available on-line at http://documentation.icefaces.org/.

Changes in This Release

ICEfaces V1.5 includes over 140 fixes and enhancements.  Click here to review the complete Change Log of changes made between the V1.5 and V1.0.1. releases.

The most notable changes are listed below:

General

• ICEfaces is now an open source product.  It is available in both a binary and a source code release. 

Core Framework

• Clean DOM rendering mechanism improves support for 3rd party JSF component compatibility.
  
  
• Server-initiated rendering API's now support startup, shutdown and disposal methods for group renderers.
  
  
• Performance Improvements:
• Use of hidden fields has been reduced which improves form processing time and reduces size of DOM updates.
• Finer-grained synchronization has been incorporated into Servlet processing.
  
  
• Dynamic application reload for modified .jspx and .jsp pages improves developer productivity.
  

ICEfaces Component Suite

• New Components;
• Positioned Panel Component:  With the panelPositioned component lists can be used to generate a series of repeating child-components within a panel. Each one of these child-components is draggable and can exchange positions with other children. In addition, a child component can be moved between different positioned panels components.
  
• Chart Component: The outputChart component encapsulates Krysalis jCharts functionality (http://jcharts.sourceforge.net/).  It supports both pie  (2D and 3D), and axis (area, areastacked, bar, barclustered, barstacked, line, and point) type charts.  The outputChart component provides full interactivity through actionListener bindings with the clientSideImageMap. The outputChart component can be generated statically or dynamically.

• Modification to the tree component provide better support for lazy loading of branches.
• IceUserObject includes a new boolean attribute leaf which explicitly declares leaf nodes.  All other nodes default to branches.
• Expand/collapse events are now available through ActionListener binding to the Tree and/or TreeNode.  It is possible to cause and capture Node expand/collapse events.
  
  
• Several enhancements to the data table have been introduced.
• A columns component has been introduced that provides a dynamic model for adding and deleting columns programmatically.  The columns component works in conjunction with the ice:dataTable, with the headerClass and columnClasses being assigned for all generated columns.
• A rowSelector tag enables row selection for dataTable and supports the following attributes: value, multiple, selectionListener, selectedClass, mouseOverClass.
• dataTable now supports a scrollable attribute that enables a scroll bar for the table.
  
  
• Several additional script.aculo.us effects are now supported including: scale, puff, blind up/down, switch off, drop out, shake, slide up/down, squish, grow, shrink, and fold.
  

• A new attribute target has been added to menu component that can change the URL in a separate window or frame. (Same as the Anchor target attribute.)

• Connection status component now support ability to redirect on connection error.
  
  
• File Upload component now uses commons-io-1.2.
  
  
• Panel Tab now supports icons in the tabs.
  
  
• A Hover class has been added to Panel Group.
  
  
• Panel Popup now supports the effect attribute.
  
  
• SelectInputText width can now be specified in any unit (eg: 100, 100px, 100em, 100pt).
  
  
• A style class has been added to command sort header.
  

Tools

• Tools integration bundles are now supplied separately from the ICEfaces release and include their own release notes.  Go to http://www.icefaces.org to download tools integration bundles.
  

Early Access Features

• Preliminary integration with JBoss Seam has been achieved.  Visit the ICEfaces Knowledge Base for details.
  
  
• Preliminary Portal support has been achieved.  Visit the ICEfaces Knowledge Base for details.

Supported Browsers, Application Servers, and Tools

Browsers

J2EE Application Servers

J2EE Integrated Development Environments (IDEs)

Known Issues

The following are known issues with this release:

General

• There are conditions in which the asynchronous communication between the server and browser stops (such as the user pressing the browser "stop" button or allowing their machine to sleep). In this situation, the application server console will show the following exception (including stack trace) with no functional impact:

• If at any time the asynchronous connection between the browser and the server is lost due to a network interruption, reloading the page will generally restore normal operation from the previous application state.

• ICEfaces pages included via <jsp:include> or <tiles:insert> have distinct PersistentFacesContext objects even if they are included by the same parent page. For this reason, application-initiated renders will apply only to the inclusion associated with the particular PersistentFacesContext.

• Inclusion of ICEfaces content from JSP is not compatible with MyFaces.

• Integration of HTML renderers with the ICEfaces Direct-to-DOM renderers is generally possible but idiosyncrasies have been noted with a small number of custom renderers. In these cases, enclosing the custom tag with a standard JSF panelGrid tag in the source document can help to correct the problem.

• Attempting to retrieve a Request parameter in the url using the following syntax is not supported (returns null):
     FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().getExternalContext().getRequestParameterMap().get(paramName);
  A workaround for this issue is to retrieve the Request parameter using the following alternative syntax:
   ((HttpServletRequest)FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().getExternalContext().getRequest()).getParameter(paramName);

• When using ICEfaces with com.icesoft.faces.concurrentDOMViews enabled, reloading the page or opening the application with more than one browser window simultaneously will prevent references to any request-scoped beans from being removed, resulting in them being unable to be garbage collected until the user session expires. Further, any component bindings must be in request scope in this configuration as a component binding in session or application scope in concurrent views can lead to a component existing simultaneously in two component trees with unpredictable behavior.
  

• Cookies can be set though the ((BridgeExternalContext) FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().getExternalContext()).addCookie(new Cookie("test","test")); method.

JSP Markup

• UIComponentBodyTag processing supports only a single call to doAfterBody(). The full JSP lifecycle for iterative body processing is not supported.

• The first-generation children of the DataTable's table-header and column-header facets must be standard JSF components. For example, plain markup cannot be contained on its own within these facets, it must be wrapped in a panelGrid and the panelGrid, in turn, can be contained within the facet.

• JSP Page to Document conversion escapes &nbsp, but &nbsp in JSP Documents must be manually escaped by the developer as &amp;nbsp. Similarly, & characters must be escaped as &amp;.

• Non-JSF JSP tags (<jsp:xxx/>, etc.) embedded in JSP Pages and Documents are ignored by the ICEfaces parser with the exception of the inclusion mechanism (see Markup Reference in Developer's Guide for details).

• Java code (<% ...%>, etc.) embedded in JSP Pages and Documents is ignored by the ICEfaces parser with the exception of the inclusion mechanism (see Markup Reference in Developer's Guide for details).

• Input documents must be well-formed XML.

• Deprecated HTML elements, specifically the FONT element, do not respond properly to DOM manipulation functions in the ICEfaces client-side JavaScript bridge. (see HTML 4.01 Specification for details on deprecated HTML Elements).

• Pages should contain both a <head> tag and a <body> tag so that they are well-formed XHTML and ICEfaces can easily add a link to its own custom JavaScript library.

• Any ICEfaces page included from a JSP via <jsp:include/> must contain a <body> tag as the content of the <body> tag is precisely the content inserted into the including page.

• Tiles tags are not supported within ICEfaces pages, but ICEfaces pages may be included via Tiles.

• If multiple ICEfaces inclusions are performed by the same parent JSP, each ICEfaces form must have a manually applied unique ID.

• JSP Pages are dynamically converted to JSP Documents for processing by the ICEfaces parser, so it is important not to mix JSP Page and JSP document types when performing static inclusion.

ICEfaces Component Suite

• All ICEfaces Component Suite components must be enclosed in a JSF form component (i.e. ice:form, h:form, or ui:form).

• Drag & Drop (panelGroup)
  
• In Internet Explorer dragging and holding an image will cause the cursor to change to the not symbol. Operation returns to normal with a second left mouse button click.

• Effects (various components)
  
• In Internet Explorer the Fade, Appear, and Pulsate effects will not transition when used with select elements.
  
• In Safari the Highlight effect will does not work on buttons and lists.

• inputFile
  
• When using Firefox / Mozilla with the inputFile component, if the user interacts with the ICEfaces application while a file is being uploaded, the file-upload operation may terminate abnormally. The ICEfaces application itself will remain functional. In order to avoid this possibility it is recommended that fileUpload operations be performed in a modal panelPopup to prevent user-interaction with the ICEfaces application while the file upload is in progress. For example, the application may display a progress-bar in a modal panelPopup that displays the upload progress while also preventing further user-interaction while the upload is in progress.

• menuBar
  • When a menu is expanded and the user clicks on one of the menu items, and then the same menu is expanded again, the last-clicked menu item will appear with a dashed outline. This is only an issue in the Firefox or Mozilla browser.

• panelPopup
• When using a modal panelPopup it may be necessary to ensure that the body region of the page covers the entire visible region of the document or the component used to block user interaction with the document may not cover the entire page. To accomplish this a surrounding DIV sized to 100% width and height can be used to enclose all content in the document body. For example:
  

  <html><body><div style="width:100%;height:100%;"> ...page content...  </div></body></html> 

• panelTabSet
• On Safari browsers only, the layout of the tabs is incorrect, with horizontal spacing between the tabs.
• On Safari browsers only, the tab panel resizes when tabs are selected.

Facelets

• When using an ice:outputDeclaration component in a Facelets document on a JBoss application server, several warning messages may be logged. These warnings do not affect the performance or behavior of the component and can be ignored.

Application Servers

• BEA Weblogic Server 9
• In order to run ICEfaces on the BEA Weblogic Server 9, the html and core tld files located in jsf-impl.jar should be extracted from the jar file and placed into the WEB-INF folder of any application you want to deploy.

• Websphere Application Server 6.0.0.1
• A bug in the application server prevents the Timezone Step 3+ tutorials from running correctly. A WebSphere patch is available from IBM that resolves this issue: APAR numberPQ99195, http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=180&uid=swg1PQ99195.
  
• The Component Effects demonstration in the ICEfaces Component Showcase application doesn't display the effects when hosted on WebSphere v6.0.0.1 server.
   
  
• Tomcat 5.5
• Tutorials bundled with the ICEfaces release will not build and deploy to Tomcat 5.5 with MyFaces due to a conflict related to jsp-api.jar.  To build and deploy tutorials on Tomcat 5.5 with MyFaces, it is necessary to modify the .../install_dir/ICEfaces-1.5/icefaces/samples/tutorial/build.properties and set tomcat55=true prior to building the application.
  

Support

Open source community support is available at http://www.icefaces.org. For commercial support please visit http://www.icesoft.com/support.

License Notice

License agreements can be found in the .../install_dir/ICEfaces-1.5/icefaces/docs/license directory.

© Copyright 2005-2006. ICEsoft Technologies, Inc.