ICEpack is a suite of technologies and documentation that enhance your ICEfaces project lifecycle from development and testing, to deployment of enterprise-strength ICEfaces applications.
Development
Getting your project off to the right start, and keeping it on track with ICEfaces development best practices are critical factors in minimizing your development time, and maximizing the success of your development project. ICEpack draws from the expertise of the most experienced ICEfaces application developers around, ICEsoft's own Engineering Services Team, to deliver training, application templates and a collection of useful composite components honed from a multitude of successful ICEfaces development projects.
Facelets Application Templates:
Facelets has proven to be the most effective way to develop ICEfaces applications, and a good set of Facelet-based application templates provides the superstructure to effectively organize and manage your ICEfaces development project. ICEpack provides a suite of Facelet application templates that can be used as is, or quickly modified to provide a suitable starting point for any ICEfaces application. Furthermore, the templates have been packaged for various open source and commercial IDEs so you can begin working with them immediately in your development environment of choice. Find out more about theFacelets Application Templates
.
ICEfaces Composite Component Library:
A multitude of application development engagements has lead the ICEfaces Engineering Services team to develop a collection of Composite Components that drastically reduce application development time by providing composite UI controls not available in the standard ICEfaces component suite, or simplifying page design and markup in a significant way. This collection of components is now available to you as part of the ICEpack and ICEfaces EE, and it comes with complete source code examples and documentation so you can quickly put these components to work in your project. Find out more about theICEfaces Composite Component Library
.
Testing
As your ICEfaces project progresses, functional and load testing activities become critical to the completion of development, and position you for successful deployment of the completed application. ICEpack contains the tools and know-how for developing and executing an effective test strategy for your ICEfaces applications, including both functional and load testing capabilities. Learn from and leverage the same testing techniques used by the ICEfaces development team to test the framework itself.
Functional Testing:
Selenium is the test tool of choice for ICEfaces functional testing. ICEpack contains an extensive tutorial on functional testing of ICEfaces applications using Selenium, and includes a suite of example test scripts for a variety of ICEfaces demo applications that you can learn and build from.
Load Testing:
Most legacy commercial load testing technologies are not well suited to testing Ajax-based applications, and Ajax Push brings additional complexities into play when load testing ICEfaces applications. ICEpack provides several facilities for load testing ICEfaces applications, including:
JMeter
facilitates recording of complex UI interactions, and has proven to be effective for load testing user interaction and navigation aspects of ICEfaces applications. ICEpack contains an extensive tutorial on JMeter testing of ICEfaces applications, including working examples of JMeter test scripts. It also includes the complete test suite for ICEfaces sample applications used to test the ICEfaces product release itself, so you have lots of working examples to learn from.
The ICEfaces Java Test Client
is a custom Java test tool that provides an extensible client for testing ICEfaces applications. Working in Java, you can develop simulated clients that perform several important client server interactions, including the precise simulation of the Ajax Push mechanism in ICEfaces. This makes the Java Test Client well suited to simulating passive clients for load testing of Ajax Push scenarios. The Java Test Client can also be used in conjunction with JMeter to develop sophisticated scenarios for collaborative application testing that include both consumers and producers of Ajax Push events. ICEpack contains a detailed tutorial with working examples and source code, as well as a range of additional examples that illustrate various capabilities of the Java Test Client.
NeoLoad
is now integrated with ICEfaces to test the performance of ICEfaces, and ICEfaces Ajax Push applications. Find out more aboutNeoload and ICEfaces
.
When the time comes to take your ICEfaces applications live, ICEpack contains everything you need to achieve an enterprise-grade, clustered deployment.
Enterprise Push Server:
Building on the capabilities of the open source Push Server, theEnterprise Push Server
provides scalable, distributed support for clustered Ajax Push deployments. It integrates with all major open source and commercial application servers, including automatic detection of native Asynchronous Request Processing mechanisms, to facilitate highly scalability and high-availability clustered deployment of Ajax Push-enabled ICEfaces applications.
Enterprise Deployment Guide:
Clustered deployments of ICEfaces applications require considerably more configuration than single node deployments. ICEpack contains complete Deployment Configuration Guides and sample configuration data for all major open source and commercial applications servers. These guides include configurations for front end web servers with load balancing and fail over support, JMS configurations for inter-node communications, andEnterprise Push Server
configurations for clustered support of Ajax Push-enabled ICEfaces applications.
Clustered Ajax-Push Development Guide:
There are several additional considerations for development of Ajax Push applications that will be deployed into clustered environments. This guide provides a detailed tutorial and working example that steps you through the process of adapting an ICEfaces application to use broadcast rendering, which is required for Ajax Push to function as expected in a clustered deployment.
