Spent the last few nights experimenting with the bleeding edge of Java Server Faces (JSF), Prime Faces and Tomcat and expectedly came away bloody and a lot more wiser.
Java Server Faces has come a long way in the last 5 years or so but a steep learning curve and relatively poor documentation makes it even harder to adapt. The latest specification release of JSF is 2.1, compatible with JavaEE 6 application servers, or any server implementing Servlet 3.0.JSF has two main implementation flavours- Apache MyFaces and Sun (now Oracle 's) Mojarra.
Now herein lies the problem.There are some subtle differences between JSF 2.0 and 2.1 specifications as pointed out by BaluC. JSF 2.1 is aimed at marrying the Servlet 3.0 API and so targets Servlet Containers supporting the 3.0 specification, such as Tomcat 7.0, Glassfish v3. while JSF 2.0 was aimed at the Servlet specification 2.5 and so works well with earlier releases of the servers.
If you are intending to use the latest release of Tomcat which is 7.0.22 and JSF MyFaces, you should be fine but if you try and bring in a component library such as Tomahawk, you'll find that support for the > JSF 2.0 version of a JSF implementation is not all there.I decided to use PrimeFaces and went with 3.0M4, a milestone release from last week and while the setup and integration of the stack (Tomcat 7.0.22, MyFaces 2.3.1 (and later I removed MyFaces and bought in Mojarra) was smooth(Thanks to Maven), getting the FileUpload component of PrimeFaces to work was impossible. The fileUpload bean would just not get called and there were no errors in the server log. Baffling!!Questions to the user forum did not show much light until I came upon Bug 49711 related to annotation scanning in the Tomcat archives. The problem was not with PrimeFaces of a JSF implementation but with a regression of Tomcat's handling of a multi-part request. This problem was reported since version 7.0.6 and while there is an indication that setting allowCasualMultipartParsing = true in the Context definition will by-pass this issue, I can tell you otherwise. Anyway, I got it all to work with Tomcat 7.0.2 (i.e I had to go back 20 releases).
Tomcat version 7.0 onwards implements the Servlet 3.0 specification and brings in some new and very much needed features such as out-of-the box authentication support(via the HttpRequest) and FileUpload. This major leap forward could have possibly led to these regression defects that need to be addressed before Tomcat can be regarded as a stable candidate for implementing a JSF based stack. JSF (MyFaces & Mojarra) doesn't really help Tomcat in the sense that itself is in a state of evolution and the component libraries are struggling to keep up.
To end on a positive note, I was very impressed by the PrimeFaces showcase and the extensive set of features offered which currently makes it one of the best JSF component libraries going around.However, again a word of caution.The last stable release of version PrimeFaces is 2.2.1 which has Flash based components while the latest 'milestone' version 3.0M4 is based on HTML5.This again is a major revamp of the architecture and currently the forum is littered with support questions and reports of 'not working', so wait for a few more releases before choosing PrimeFaces version 3+ or like me, prepare for battle!!
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