ICEfaces® v2.0 Alpha 1 Release Notes

Overview

This document contains the following sections:

About This Release
Runtime Dependencies
Known Issues
About ICEfaces
License information

About This Release

ICEfaces v2.0 Alpha 1 is an early developer milestone for the next-generation of ICEfaces, designed for JSF 2.0.

Review the Known Issues prior to using this release. Review the Migration Notes if you plan to port an existing ICEfaces 1.x application with 2.0 Alpha 1.

This release includes the following:

ICEfaces 2.0 Core

The new ICEfaces 2.0 ("Glimmer") core is suitable for deployment to any JSF 2.0.1 runtime environment. By deploying the icefaces.jar in a JSF 2 application you can immediately benefit from ICEfaces Direct-to-Dom architecture, with all page updates becoming smooth partial-page updates without requiring use of the JSF 2 f:ajax tag (of course, using f:ajax works also).

Internally, the changes are significant, and many simplifications were possible within ICEfaces through use of the standard JSF Ajax features (such as PartialViewContext and jsf.js). For the application developer, though, the major changes at this point lie with JSF 2.0 itself. For instance, two significant benefits from JSF 2.0 are that Facelets is now standard, and that you have the option to use annotations rather than faces-config.xml for managed bean definitions.

Notable Changes

new packaging, org.icefaces.*
a new push API, org.icefaces.application.PushRenderer.
Servlet 3.0 implementations are automatically detected to take advantage of asynchronous NIO features.
3rd party library dependencies have been minimized / eliminated for simplified configuration and deployment.
No need for a separate ICEfaces servlet configuration.
No custom ICEfaces view-handler is required thereby improving integration with "well-behaved" 3rd party JSF components.

Configuration Tips

web.xml

it is recommended to set the "javax.faces.PROJECT_STAGE" configuration parameter to "Production" to avoid potential issues with dynamically inserted faces message components.
<param-name>javax.faces.PROJECT_STAGE</param-name> <param-value>Production</param-value>
no other web.xml configuration changes are required

the icefaces.jar must be in the classpath
the <f:view> tag must be the first tag on the page, preceding the HTML tag (<f:view><html>, not <html><f:view>).
the <f:view> tag must configure the "xHTML_BASIC" renderKit: <f:view renderKitId="xHTML_BASIC">

Note that the new ICEfaces core is not directly backwards compatible with ICEfaces 1.x applications. Anyone wanting to port and existing ICEfaces 1.x application to ICEfaces 2.0 should see the following section on "ICEfaces 1.x Compatibility Support".

ICEfaces 1.x Compatibility Support

To ease the effort required to port existing ICEfaces 1.x applications to the JSF2/ICEfaces 2.0 this release includes the following backwards-compatibility features:

ICEfaces 1.8 Compatibility APIs

A set of ICEfaces 1.8 APIs that can optionally be used with ICEfaces 2.0 to ease migration of existing applications or custom components that may require them.
Contained in the icefaces-compat.jar
Note that the following ICEfaces 1.8 APIs are not available:

com.icesoft.faces.context.DisposableBean (use the JSF2 @PostConstruct and @PreDestroy annotations instead).
Certain push APIs (use com.icesoft.faces.async.render.SessionRenderer, or the new org.icefaces.application.PushRendererinstead):

com.icesoft.faces.async.render.OnDemandRenderer
com.icesoft.faces.async.render.IntervalRenderer
com.icesoft.faces.async.render.RenderManager
com.icesoft.faces.webapp.xmlhttp.PersistentFacesState

When using compatibility mode the following configuration is recommended (in the web.xml file) to emulate expected behavior that was included in the ICEfaces 1.8 Facelets implementation:

<context-param> <param-name>javax.faces.FACELETS_SKIP_COMMENTS</param-name> <param-value>true</param-value> </context-param>

ICEfaces 1.8 Compatible Component Suite

Provides the ICEfaces 1.8 Component Suite in an ICEfaces 2.0 compatible format.
Requires the ICEfaces 1.8 Compatibility APIs.
Contained in the icefaces-comps-compat.jar

Sample Applications

The following sample applications are included:

Auction (/samples/auction)

Demonstrates using JSF2 standard components with ICEfaces and Ajax Push to provide an online auction application.

Auction Monitor (/compat/samples/auction)

Demonstrates running the ICEfaces 1.8 version of the auctionMonitor sample application with ICEfaces 2 using the ICEfaces 1.8 compatibility jars (icefaces-compat.jar, icefaces-comps-compat.jar).

Component Showcase (/compat/samples/component-showcase)

Demonstrates running the ICEfaces 1.8 version of the Component Showcase sample application with ICEfaces 2 using the ICEfaces 1.8 compatibility jars (icefaces-compat.jar, icefaces-comps-compat.jar).

Runtime Dependencies

This release requires the following:

JDK 1.5 or greater
Sun "Mojarra" JSF 2.0.1 runtime (included).

Known Issues

The following section describes the most commonly encountered known issues with this release:

JSPs are not supported by ICEfaces 2.0, use Facelets instead.
The included sample application .wars and builds are targeted for deployment to Tomcat 6. The included libraries may need to be altered if deploying to other application servers. See "Appendix A - ICEfaces Library/App. Server Dependencies" of the "ICEfaces 1.8 Developer's Guide" for more details.
The compatible ICEfaces Component Suite included in this release is based on the ICEfaces 1.8.0 components. The components will be updated to the latest ICEfaces 1.8.x version in a future ICEfaces 2.0 developer release.
The following ICEfaces 1.8 Component Suite components are not functional or have notable issues in this release:

ice:inputFile
ice:loadBundle
ice:outputBody (use h:body instead)
ice:outputConnectionStatus
ice:outputHead (use h:head instead)
ice:outputHtml (use <HTML> tag instead)
ice:panelPopup (works, but has glitches with some settings, see ICE-5072 for details)
ice:selectInputText (works, but is glitchy, see ICE-5033 for details)

In some cases an NullPointerException may be logged against the org.icefaces.application.WindowScopeManager. This runtime error can be safely ignored.

Support

Open source community support is available at http://www.icefaces.org.

About ICEfaces

ICEfaces delivers extensions to Java ServerFaces (JSF) that provide an AJAX-enabled rich presentation environment for JSF applications. ICEfaces brings value to any Java EE 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 (Ajax Push).
The ICEfaces Component Suite, a complete rich JSF component suite that fully leverages ICEfaces capabilities.
API support for rapid development of group-aware and collaborative applications, such as Chat, Webcast, social apps., etc.

License Notice

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