ICEsoft.org Forums: ICEfaces, ICEmobile, ICEpdf

I'm new to ICEfaces but want to give it a go - however the ICEfaces visual plugin is not supported anymore in Netbeans 6.7 so was wondering about tutorials to help with getting a feel for this, specifically with getting it going in Netbeans. The existing one on the netbeans site that Google/Sun throws up is Visually Web based.
http://www.netbeans.org/kb/articles/icefaces-netbeans-crud-apps.html

I know there is a list of tutorials at http://www.icefaces.org/main/resources/tutorials.iface but some handholding would help - For starters I'm unsure how to create a new Icefaces page in Netbeans - its a JSP page but I don't know how it should be pointed to.

Hi! actually the visual designer requires some .nbm (Netbeans module files).

So if you have them you will be able to design the application visually.

You will find the same on this page:
http://www.icefaces.org/main/downloads/os-downloads.iface?category=NetBeans.

What I do to create a new ICEfaces page is simply just right click on the folder in your project where you want to page (Usually the Web Pages folder) and then select New -> JSP... If this option isn't available then you may need to go into Other to find it. Once you have selected JSP a new Popup will show and you just need to create the name of the page and then I select the "JSP Document (XML Syntax)" radio button. This will create a JSPX page for you. I often use my own starting template rather than using the generated one. Here is an example:

Code:

 <f:view xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html"
         xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core"
         xmlns:ice="http://www.icesoft.com/icefaces/component">
     <ice:outputDeclaration doctypeRoot="HTML"
                            doctypePublic="-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
                            doctypeSystem="http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"/>
     <html>
         <head>
             <meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
                   content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"></meta>
             <title>ICEfaces Example - Main Page</title>
             <ice:outputStyle href="./xmlhttp/css/rime/rime.css"/>
         </head>
         <body>
             <h2>Main Page</h2>
             <ice:form>
                
             </ice:form>
         </body>
     </html>
 </f:view>

At the moment we don't have any tutorials for this but using the existing tutorials for reference will help.

Arran

If you download Netbeans 6.7 Integration from icefaces.org, there is guide.pdf file, which includes instructions of using icefaces netbeans integration features.

Liming

Somebody here says:

Hi! actually the visual designer requires some .nbm (Netbeans module files).

But the notes to the linked files you can download there, says for netbeans

Known Issues
Netbeans VWP (Visual Web Project) visual designer is not supported.
NetBeans v6.5.1 is recommended to any users who would like to use ICEfaces Visual Web Project (VWP) integration

Means: There is no visual support for visual desgning ICEfaces portlet pages and any kind of other web page type as well) yet! The same also holds for any other kind of dev. tool (eclipse, Intellij, ..).

I think, this is really a big problem when using this promising "API". Last time I saw a commercial tool for developing jsf pages visually. This was impressive. It's also a question of productivity in practice.

greetz

Well, I got it. They may have discouraged due to performance issues while generating and testing pages in 6.1 and 6.5.
Those versions are pretty slow on low end systems.