ICEsoft.org Forums: ICEfaces, ICEmobile, ICEpdf

I think it's important to put some perspective on the situation and also to correct some gross inaccuracies in some of the claims coming out of a number of blog and forum posts (including this one).

ICEfaces is first and foremost a JSF framework, providing core features such as Automatic Ajax and Ajax Push. It can be leveraged by any JSF project, with or without using the ICEfaces ACE, ICE, or EE Components. While we develop much of the technology ourselves, and are in fact the originators of important innovations such as DOMdiff-based rendering and Ajax Push, we also take advantage of the interoperability features of JSF and leverage available third party technologies when appropriate. Part of the ICEfaces product strategy is to identify appropriate best of breed technologies and integrate them into the framework to provide a more valuable solution for our users.

When we do integrate third-party technologies we apply whatever code changes that are necessary to facilitate both the initial integration and long-term supportability of the technology. The resulting product must meet our quality standards and operate seamlessly across the wide range of platforms we are committed to support.

In the case of the ACE Components library we have leveraged popular third-party open source libraries such as jQuery, YUI, and PrimeFaces. This activity has been ongoing for the past 7+ months and has been included in all of our preview releases for ICEfaces 3.0, and is also presented on the icefaces.org (now icesoft.org) website in the ACE Component Library FAQ.

It has been stated here that the ACE components were "90%" copied from PrimeFaces, with no code changes other than package names and no clear enhancement of the components.

These representations are misleading and untrue. Out of a total of 41 ACE components included in ICEfaces 3:

13 have NO PrimeFaces ancestry or code whatsoever

ace:animation

ace:dateTimeEntry

ace:excludeFromExport

ace:sliderEntry

ace:tabSet

ace:tabPane

ace:tabProxy

ace:fileEntry

ace:checkboxButton

ace:commandButton

ace:linkButton

ace:panelExpansion

ace:tableConfigPanel

19 were PrimeFaces sourced and have received substantial enhancements and bug fixes

ace:ajax

ace:accordion

ace:accordionPane

ace:dataTable (completely re-implemented with advanced features and reliability)

ace:cellEditor

ace:column

ace:columnGroup

ace:expansionToggler

ace:row

ace:rowEditor

ace:rowExpansion

ace:dataExporter

ace:dialog

ace:menu

ace:menuBar

ace:notificationPanel

ace:panel

ace:progressBar

ace:tooltip

9 were PrimeFaces sourced and integrated with the ICEfaces ACE environment

ace:contextMenu

ace:menuButton

ace:menuItem

ace:submenu

ace:draggable

ace:droppable

ace:resizable

ace:maskedEntry

ace:printer

During the course of ICEfaces 3.0 development, there have been several hundred ACE-related code-commits to the SVN repository, and over 200 ACE component JIRAs resolved relating to bugs and feature enhancements (improvements). Many of these JIRAs were generated as a result of extensive automated and manual QA processes that were applied to the new components.

Many of the representations involving 0% code change claims between the libraries are selective in nature and equally untrue. In fact, all of the integrated PrimeFaces components (that were themselves wrapped JQuery / YUI JavaScript components) have been modified to integrate with the ICEfaces framework, fix minor bugs, and leverage the ICEfaces Advanced Component Environment (incl. component generation). These changes are evident in the additional component Java class files and xxxMeta.java files associated with the components. Interested parties need only inspect the actual components in the download bundles or our SVN repository to confirm the obvious differences.

Regards,
Ken

Hi,

This looks like a bug. This is the JIRA for it: http://jira.icefaces.org/browse/ICE-7750

This should be fixed for 3.0.1 next week, 3.0.1 should be available around the end of this month, or you can get it of the maintenance SVN repo once it's committed (http://anonsvn.icefaces.org/repo/icefaces3/branches/icefaces-3.0.x-maintenance/).

Thx. for reporting this.

Regards,
Ken

Hi,

Thanks for reporting this. It may be an issue related to high volumes on the site this morning after a large newsletter went out overnight. We're looking into it.

Regards,
Ken

Hi,

Make sure *all* your maven entries refer to version "3.0.0" for the icefaces libs, including the icefaces.jar and icepush.jar. You cannot mix the 3.0.0.RC2 jars with 3.0.0 final ones.

Regards,
Ken

Hi,

Can you post a simple test app. that shows the issue?

Regards,
Ken

Hi,

Those tags are not ACE components. You can combine ACE and ICE components on the page, but they each need to use their own namespace to work.

e.g. ace:fileEntry, ice:panelGrid, etc.

Ken

Hi,

Looks like you've got the ICE namespace declared for both the ice: and ace: components. Update the ace: namespace declaration to:

Code:

<html ... xmlns:ace="http://www.icefaces.org/icefaces/components">

Regards,
Ken

ICEsoft is pleased to announce the official release of ICEfaces 3.0!

What's New?

The ACE Components now include over 40 components, including an industry-leading new ace:dataTable, support for jQueryUI ThemeRoller themes, and a flexible new ace:ajax tag for client-event support.

The all-new ICEfaces Showcase sample application includes comprehensive demos for the both ACE and ICE Components, including visible source code and links to related component documentation.

ICEfaces now supports the Apache MyFaces JSF runtime, suitable for use on older JEE5 application servers.

ICEfaces core enhancements for Window Scope, Delta-Submit, messagePersistence, and mandatoryResource configuration.

The ICEfaces Documentation Wiki has been extensively updated and expanded to provide a clearer path to getting started with ICEfaces, and a greater depth of material for the Core Configurations and ACE Components.

ICEfaces is now distributed under the Apache 2.0 open-source license (previous releases were under the MPL 1.1 license).

Over 400 other enhancements, improvements, and bug fixes!

Download

ICEfaces 3.0 is available for download in the following formats:

Binary and source-code bundles.

Maven2 Public Repository (jars only).

SVN repository checkout.

IDE integration bundles are also available for:

Eclipse 3.6, 3.7

NetBeans 7.0, 7.1

More Information

Release Notes (New Features)

ICEfaces Overview

ICEfaces Documentation

ICEfaces Showcase Demo

Hi,

Thanks for reporting this! We had an embarrassing hole in our ace:fileEntry test-suite and missed this issue. It is related to an error in the ace:fileEntry resource dependencies.

Here is the JIRA: http://jira.icefaces.org/browse/ICE-7738

This has *just* been fixed for 3.0 final, which should be out late today!

Thx. again,

Ken

Hi,

I think you might be running into an issue caused by a change in the way embedded HTML markup is handled by Facelets between ICEfaces 1.8 and JSF 2. If your are an ICEfaces EE customer, the EE 2.0 release includes a special core extension that can be configured to provide backwards compatible handling of embedded HTML.

See the Convert plain HTML tags to Components section in the Core Framework Extensions ICEfaces EE 2 Wiki Topic (access restricted to licensed users).

During normal processing of a Facelets file, JSF encapsulates plain HTML tags that are not components as UIInstructions components. The result in the component tree is a hierarchy that is not obvious or intuitive.

For example, let's take the following markup:

<h:panelGrid columns="1">
<center>
<h:inputText .../>
</center>
</h:panelGrid>
The expected component tree would be a <center> tag as the only child of the <h:panelGrid>, and the parent of the <h:inputText>. With standard JSF, what happens instead is that <h:panelGrid> has 3 children: a UIInstructions child corresponding to the opening <center> tag, the <h:inputText>, and a UIInstructions child corresponding to the closing </center> tag. The <h:panelGrid> component then renders each of its children into a separate <td> tag, which will confuse the browser, since the starting <center> will be in a separate <td> than the ending </center>.

ICEfaces EE Core Extensions changes this behaviour by modifying the namespace of standard HTML tags so that an actual component is created for each one, resulting in a component tree hierarchy that more closely matches the actual page structure. To enable this feature, you must add a the following configuration parameter to the web.xml file of your application:

<context-param>
<param-name>javax.faces.FACELETS_DECORATORS</param-name>
<param-value>com.icesoft.facelets.HtmlTagDecorator</param-value>
</context-param>

Regards,
Ken

Hi,

ICEfaces EE 1.8.2.GA_P03 resolves these types of leaks.

Alternatively, ICEfaces 2.0 (or 3.0) should be fine also.

Regards,
Ken

Hi,

Yes, ICEfaces EE 3.0 will add support for WebSphere 8.

We're still updating the site materials also, thanks for pointing that out.

Regards,
Ken

Hi,

Sorry for the delay, we're working as fast as we can.

ICEfaces 3.0 (final) will release before the end of January, likely later next week.

Regards,
Ken

Hi,

I've created a JIRA to address your concerns that you may follow and comment on, etc. here: http://jira.icefaces.org/browse/ICE-7643

Regards,
Ken

Hi,

The icefaces Maven2 repositories were originally established as a feeder repository for the public Ibiblio Maven2 repository. As such, we only implemented the necessary contents as required for Ibiblio (thus, no metadata.xml files).

As to why the snapshots repository contains RC1, RC2, etc. pre-releases, we historically have not wanted these distributed to the public Ibiblio repository, so keeping them under snapshots suited that purpose, while still making them available to ICEfaces community members that use maven. In addition, we occasionally need to host custom patched versions of 3rd party libraries to fix critical issues temporarily (for example, myFaces jsf libs, or the PortletFacesBridge library), so in those cases we deploy them to the snapshots repository to make them available as needed, without presenting them as an official release of any sort.

Note that we currently deploy the icefaces artifacts to our maven2 repositories manually, since ICEfaces itself is built using Ant (and we need to support customers who prefer to build with both Ant and Maven). However, we will take your recommendations and concerns under advisement and will attempt to make our maven repositories more standard and complete in the future.

Regards,
Ken