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What do you think about a litle of Convention over Configuration for the JSF programming? if you like the idea, than read this ...

Posted by urubatan on December 14, 2006 at 2:15 PM EST
<Versão em portugues aqui>

I think JSF ia a great technology for web development, and it gets better if you mix it with the SPring Framework, but I also think it has the same problem that Java EE 1.4 has, you have to configure every thing before you can do any think ...
and it is a lot of configuration.
I do not think that configuration is a bad thing, I think that you must be able to configure, but I do not think you must be obligated to configure any thing ...

the Spring-Annotation has a JSF module, and in this module we have some goodies that I think makes Easy to program using JSF ...

Bellow we have a little example of an users and projects application (very simple) just to illustrate what I`m talking about ...
Just to make it clear, there is no faces-config.xml, the web.xml has only 21 lines, Spring Framework and XML Schema declaration already included in that, what left us 3 lines less ..., the applicationContext.xml has exactly 6 lines, but 5 of them are schema declarations and <bean> </bean>
, after that we have only one line added to the basic applicationContext.xml, 1 servlet, 1 servlet-mapping, 1 listener e 1 context-param at web.xml and it is it,
after that you just think about coding your application ...

And how is it possible?

For doing that I had to accept that every JSP for each managed bean will be in a directory with the same name as the Managed bean, and that the Managed Beans will be configured using the Spring-Annotation annotations.

for example, if you have a bean annotated with @Bean(name="projectM")
all the JSPs for that managed bean will be placed at a directory named "projectM".

so, lets see some coding ...

this is the "memory persistence engine" I have wrote for this example, all the entities are persisted in memory using a HashMap :D

package br.com.urubatan.blog;

import net.java.dev.springannotation.annotation.Bean;

import java.util.List;
import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.ArrayList;

/**
 * Created by IntelliJ IDEA.
 * User: Rodrigo
 * Date: 14/12/2006
 * Time: 12:00:45
 * To change this template use File | Settings | File Templates.
 */
@Bean(name = "persistence")
public class PersistenceExample {
    private HashMap<String, Project> projects = new HashMap<String, Project>();
    private HashMap<String, User> users = new HashMap<String, User>();

    public List<Project> allProjects() {
        return new ArrayList<Project>(projects.values());
    }

    public void updateRef(Project project) {
        projects.put(project.getName(), project);
    }

    public void add(Project project) {
        projects.put(project.getName(), project);
    }

    public List<User> allUsers() {
        return new ArrayList<User>(users.values());
    }

    public void updateRef(User user) {
        users.put(user.getUserName(), user);
    }

    public void add(User user) {
        users.put(user.getUserName(), user);
    }
}


after that I have created two value objects (that litle classes with lots of gets and sets and no logic at all) the User VO:
package br.com.urubatan.blog;

import org.hibernate.validator.NotNull;
import org.hibernate.validator.Length;

import java.io.Serializable;

public class User implements Serializable {
    private String userName;
    private String password;
    private String fullName;

    public String getUserName() {
        return userName;
    }

    public void setUserName(String userName) {
        this.userName = userName;
    }

    public String getPassword() {
        return password;
    }

    public void setPassword(String password) {
        this.password = password;
    }

    public String getFullName() {
        return fullName;
    }

    public void setFullName(String fullName) {
        this.fullName = fullName;
    }

    public boolean equals(Object o) {
        if (this == o) {
            return true;
        }
        if (o == null || getClass() != o.getClass()) {
            return false;
        }

        User user = (User) o;

        if (fullName != null ? !fullName.equals(user.fullName) : user.fullName != null) {
            return false;
        }
        if (password != null ? !password.equals(user.password) : user.password != null) {
            return false;
        }
        if (userName != null ? !userName.equals(user.userName) : user.userName != null) {
            return false;
        }

        return true;
    }

    public int hashCode() {
        int result;
        result = (userName != null ? userName.hashCode() : 0);
        result = 31 * result + (password != null ? password.hashCode() : 0);
        result = 31 * result + (fullName != null ? fullName.hashCode() : 0);
        return result;
    }

    @Override
    public String toString() {
        final StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
        sb.append("User");
        sb.append("{userName='").append(userName).append('\'');
        sb.append(", password='").append(password).append('\'');
        sb.append(", fullName='").append(fullName).append('\'');
        sb.append('}');
        return sb.toString();
    }
}


and the Project VO:
package br.com.urubatan.blog;

import java.util.List;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Collections;
import java.io.Serializable;

public class Project implements Serializable {
    private String name;
    private String description;
    private List<User> users = new ArrayList<User>();


    public String getName() {
        return name;
    }

    public void setName(String name) {
        this.name = name;
    }

    public String getDescription() {
        return description;
    }

    public void setDescription(String description) {
        this.description = description;
    }

    public List<User> getUsers() {
        return Collections.unmodifiableList(users);
    }

    public void addUser(User u) {
        if (!users.contains(u)) {
            users.add(u);
        }
    }

    public void removeUser(User u) {
        users.remove(u);
    }

    public boolean equals(Object o) {
        if (this == o) {
            return true;
        }
        if (o == null || getClass() != o.getClass()) {
            return false;
        }

        Project project = (Project) o;

        if (description != null ? !description.equals(project.description) : project.description != null) {
            return false;
        }
        if (name != null ? !name.equals(project.name) : project.name != null) {
            return false;
        }
        if (users != null ? !users.equals(project.users) : project.users != null) {
            return false;
        }

        return true;
    }

    public int hashCode() {
        int result;
        result = (name != null ? name.hashCode() : 0);
        result = 31 * result + (description != null ? description.hashCode() : 0);
        result = 31 * result + (users != null ? users.hashCode() : 0);
        return result;
    }

    @Override
    public String toString() {
        final StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
        sb.append("Project");
        sb.append("{name='").append(name).append('\'');
        sb.append(", description='").append(description).append('\'');
        sb.append(", users=").append(users);
        sb.append('}');
        return sb.toString();
    }
}


After that litle play with Java, I started all the XML coding I need for this project:
here is my web.xml
<web-app version="2.4" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
	xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee
	http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee/web-app_2_4.xsd">
	<display-name>Example JSF Application</display-name>
	<context-param>
		<param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
		<param-value>classpath*:applicationContext.xml</param-value>
	</context-param>
	<listener>
		<listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener</listener-class>
	</listener>
	<servlet>
		<servlet-name>Faces Servlet</servlet-name>
		<servlet-class>javax.faces.webapp.FacesServlet</servlet-class>
		<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
	</servlet>
	<servlet-mapping>
		<servlet-name>Faces Servlet</servlet-name>
		<url-pattern>*.jsf</url-pattern>
	</servlet-mapping>
</web-app>



and here is my applicationContext.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:sa="https://spring-annotation.dev.java.net/context"
	xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.0.xsd
       https://spring-annotation.dev.java.net/context https://spring-annotation.dev.java.net/nonav/context.xsd"	default-autowire="byName">
	<sa:annotation-autoload/>
</beans>


all done, no mor XML for today :D

after this we can start writing all the managed beans:
look ar the UserMBean bellow

package br.com.urubatan.blog;

import java.util.List;

import net.java.dev.springannotation.annotation.*;

import javax.faces.event.ActionEvent;

import org.hibernate.validator.Valid;

@Bean(name = "userM", scope = Scope.REQUEST)
@ManagedBean
public class UserMBean {
    @Out
    @Value("#{user}")
    @DataModelSelection
    private User user;
    @Out
    @Value("#{userList}")
    @DataModel(name = "users", factory = "#{userM.list}", scope = Scope.REQUEST)
    private List<User> userList;
    private PersistenceExample persistence;
    @Value("#{project}")
    private Project project;


    public void setProject(Project project) {
        this.project = project;
    }

    public void setPersistence(PersistenceExample persistence) {
        this.persistence = persistence;
    }


    public User getUser() {
        return user;
    }

    public void setUser(User user) {
        this.user = user;
    }

    public List<User> getUserList() {
        return userList;
    }

    public void setUserList(List<User> userList) {
        this.userList = userList;
    }

    public String list() {
        userList = persistence.allUsers();
        return "def:list";
    }

    public String create() {
        user = new User();
        return "def:form";
    }

    public String edit() {
        return "def:form";
    }

    public String update() {
        persistence.updateRef(user);
        return list();
    }
    
    public String save() {
        persistence.add(user);
        return list();
    }

    public void addUser(ActionEvent evt) {
        project.addUser(user);
    }
}


the addUser method adds the selected user to the project beeing edited now, the other methods are just simple CRUD methods ...

and the ProjectMBean
in this one, I had to add some of the JSF API since in the current version of the Spring-Annotation project you can have only one @DataModel per managed bean, and I had no other way to get what was the selected user to be removed from the current project ...

package br.com.urubatan.blog;

import java.util.List;
import java.util.ArrayList;

import net.java.dev.springannotation.annotation.*;

import javax.faces.event.ActionEvent;
import javax.faces.component.html.HtmlDataTable;
import javax.faces.model.SelectItem;

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