Oracle's ADF Faces

Adam Winer, from Oracle, e-mailed me late last night and informed me that he had ADF Faces working with Facelets! It was a great test for Facelets and Adam was able to find several bugs pertaining to backwards compatiblity with JSF 1.1. For me, the point of getting ADF operational was to catch compatability bugs. The good thing is that nothing was overly major, except one issue that is somewhat beyond my control.

When JSF loads ViewHandlers from configuration files, there's an ordering issue that could arise between dependencies. Since ADF and Faclets have their own ViewHandlers, Adam had to deal with resolving ViewHandlers outside of JSP. This was probably a good thing to have happen as the integration can only improve both frameworks (ADF & Facelets).

With Adam's issues, I will be filing and correcting them all by the end of the week and doing another (major) release. I'm also working on writing up a series of articles on Facelets for Kito Mann's JSFCentral.com.

I'm somewhat battling with backwards compatibility overall. I don't like having Facelets include if/else checks everywhere to behave differently depending on the JSF API version. No matter what, this can lead to some issues down the road and I will have to cut off JSF 1.1 support and proceed with JSF 1.2. When Oracle releases ADF Faces for JSF 1.2, then I will probably release a JSF 1.1 compatible final and continue on. Most components available extend UIComponentBase, so they will not have any issues with the JSF 1.2 API, they will simple just work.

I'm in agreement with Eugene's comments from my last post that Facelets should stay focused on tree creation and templating. Keep things simple. I would be open to creating a 'contrib' folder within Facelets where developers could contribute TagHandlers specifically for Facelets as a separate build target.