Saturday, June 26, 2010

Why and when use ICEFACES?

Icefaces is a great(best?) JSF library. Its great mostly becouse it make AJAX easy to use. Its so easy that you even should not know about AJAX at all.

You can do almost everything with ICEFACES. All you can do with html, javascript, you can do with ICEFACES.

Its good for most business application.

And as we said, its limitation are the same as HTML-CSS-JAVASCRIPT. In short, its not applet, flex,flash, javafx.

If your primary skills are JAVA, your markup language is HTML, and you must use AJAX in every place in you application, ICEFACES is the best choice.

If you need "PUSH" capabilities, ICEFACES will do it in simple but efficient way.

You want create your components? No problemo with ICEFACES.

Icefaces comes with number of components. But its real value is AJAX engine. Every component you will create will be AJAX enabled. Cool!

ICEFACES supports facelets. So its easy to reuse you html code.

First steps with jsf and java

Creating dynamic web application is eazy. You will need some basic java skills and some knowledge about HTML.

First, download some java development enviroment, Eclipse is free and good.

Then dowload ICEFACES jsf library.

Follow the instruction how to install it.

Download and install some java application server, Tomcat 6 is ok.