JViews JSF components for RAD

JavaServer™ Faces (JSF) is designed for easy building of Web applications. To make JViews Web application development easier, JViews has provided ready-to-use JSF components. The Getting started with JViews JSF applications section shows how JViews JSF applications can be quickly created with Eclipse™. For more information about JSF, see http://java.sun.com/javaee/javaserverfaces/.

JViews implements JSF components at two levels: the JSF component tag library and the JSF component renderers.

JViews JSF component tag library has been provided so JViews JSF components can be used at design time in IDEs that support the JSF technology. For example, <jvf:view>, <jvcf:chartView>, <jvdf:diagrammerView> have been provided to show respectively a JViews manager, a JViews chart, and a JViews diagram. These components can be easily inserted in JSP™ pages when developing JViews JSF applications with an IDE such as Eclipse.

Interactors are also provided as JSF components. For example, <jvf:zoomInteractor> and <jvdf:selectInteractor> can be inserted in JSP pages to create a zoom interactor and a select interactor respectively.

This way, a JViews JSF application can be quickly created by combining JSF components. The list of JViews JSF components can be found in these Tag Libraries.

For each JViews JSF component used at design time, a dedicated renderer has been implemented. The renderers translate a JSP page that you have authored at design time to an HTML page at run time. That is the result you can see with Web browsers.

For JViews JSF application developers, you can consider these renderers as a black boxes. You do not need to check the code of these renderers nor understand how the components are rendered. However, under certain situations, you need to understand what HTML elements are generated for a given JSF component. For example, you must ensure that there are <div>, <img>, and <script> elements generated for a <jvdf:diagrammerView> component.

As a developer, you need to check these elements at run time for two reasons:

To debug. You can use a debug tool, such as Firebug, to check if the component is well generated, or if a given JavaScript variable has the right value.

To customize. You must understand the structure of HTML elements generated for a given component before using JavaScript variable code to customize its behavior.