JSFToolbox 1.0, a suite of JSF design and coding extensions for Dreamweaver, was released today by Tarantula Consulting, a Web design and J2EE consultancy based in Ottawa, Canada. JSFToolbox adds JSF tags and components to Macromedia's industry-leading Web authoring tool and significantly enhances Dreamweaver's JSP support with key features such as: * Visual JSF tags, inspectors, and drag-and-drop toolbars * Round-trip engineering with Java development environments * Design-time introspection of JSF beans, components, and configuration files * Web page internationalization with message bundles and locales * JSF and JSP expression language syntax auto-complete * Comprehensive documentation with code samples * Context-sensitive help for JSF Core and JSF HTML tag libraries JSFToolbox 1.0 is compatible with the Java 2 Platform Standard Edition 5.0 and enables Java developers to import JSF backing beans, message bundles, and UI components directly into Dreamweaver. A free 15-day trial of JSFToolbox is available now for download from http://www.jsftoolbox.com. Macromedia offers a 30-day trial download of Dreamweaver 8 for developers who are new to the software. The JSFToolbox website was designed using JSFToolbox, Dreamweaver 8 and Adobe Photoshop CS2, while the application layer was developed using Eclipse 3.1, Facelets, Apache MyFaces, Spring and Hibernate. Screenshots and documentation are available on the product website. Tarantula is currently working on FaceletsTools and TomahawkTools, two additional JSF extension suites for Dreamweaver based on JSFToolbox. Thoughts and feedback from the JSF community are welcome. Message was edited by: rlynch@techtarget.com

Hi, Are FaceletsTools & TomahawkTools going to be part of JSFToolbox or you have to purchase them additionally? Mauricio Lopez PS: I browsed the site but could not see a price tag for this tool without creating an account.

Hi,

Are FaceletsTools & TomahawkTools going to be part of JSFToolbox or you have to purchase them additionally?

Mauricio Lopez

PS: I browsed the site but could not see a price tag for this tool without creating an account.

Hi Mauricio, Thanks for your interest. I have made the pricing visible on the download page, but you still need to sign in. :) The combined price of JSFToolbox and Dreamweaver 8 is still less than comparable commercial JSF tools. FaceletsTools and TomahawkTools are separate products currently in development. The timeframe for their release is Q3 2006 and Q4 2006 respectively. They will be sold separately from JSFToolbox for a nominal price but will extend its capabilities to support Facelets view definition and MyFaces Tomahawk components. The JSFToolbox value proposition is highly specialized tool for the JSF presentation layer. You design your JSF pages in Dreamweaver's Web authoring environment, but you still code and test your application in a Java IDE. If you are concerned about price, Tarantula is offering educational and team discounts. Send us an email at sales at tarantulaconsulting dot com if you are interested. Cheers, Ian

It's USD299.99. I can't tell you how childish this behaviour is trying to force people providing personal data just to get to know the price they can pay for a product..

JSFToolbox significantly upgrades Dreamweaver's JSP support ...

Is there support for JSP tagfiles, JSTL and other other JSP features not supported in Dreamweaver? When I drag a link to the JSF view /foo.jsp, will Dreamwever (with installed JSFToolbox) put /foo.faces or /faces/foo.jsp in hfef, or just /foo.jsp? If I rename /foo.jsp to /bar.jsp in Dreamwever (with installed JSFToolbox) will it change /foo.jsp to /bar.jsp in Faces navigation rules and h:outputLink tags? Does JSFToolbox support copy-on-save from the source web folder to the build web folder (like in NetBeans)? If I set up server to look at the build folter, then I need copy-on-save to see the last saved changes when I refresh a page in a browser. Nebojsa

Thanks for the feedback. FYI the pricing is now visible on the products page. You don't have to sign up to see it now. :-)

JSFToolbox significantly upgrades Dreamweaver's JSP support ...

Is there support for JSP tagfiles, JSTL and other other JSP features not supported in Dreamweaver?

Definitely. JSFToolbox adds support for the JSTL Core tag library. JSP custom tag support is planned and should be available in a future release. http://www.jsftoolbox.com/documentation/help/06-CodeView/jstl.jsf

When I drag a link to the JSF view /foo.jsp, will Dreamwever (with installed JSFToolbox) put /foo.faces or /faces/foo.jsp in hfef, or just /foo.jsp? If I rename /foo.jsp to /bar.jsp in Dreamwever (with installed JSFToolbox) will it change /foo.jsp to /bar.jsp in Faces navigation rules and h:outputLink tags?

To integrate JSF support with Dreamweaver's link checking and live data features, applications should use the /faces/* prefix mapping option for the Faces servlet. This will allow you to drag links to JSP pages and Dreamweaver will insert /faces/page.jsp as the href attribute for link tags. Please see the documentation on Creating a New Dreamweaver Site for more information. http://www.jsftoolbox.com/documentation/help/03-DevelopingWebSites/new-site.jsf

Does JSFToolbox support copy-on-save from the source web folder to the build web folder (like in NetBeans)? If I set up server to look at the build folter, then I need copy-on-save to see the last saved changes when I refresh a page in a browser.

Nebojsa

Yes. Dreamweaver has an excellent secure file transfer utility and you can enable automatic upload on save anytime you want. The JSFToolbox documentation on Rapid Application Development has more information on this. http://www.jsftoolbox.com/documentation/help/03-DevelopingWebSites/rad.jsf

Thanks! I appreciate it a lot.

No problem. :) One last point about how JSFToolbox upgrades Dreamweaver's JSP support. Dreamweaver's native Java capabilities such as JavaBean introspection are only compatible with code that is compiled using JDK 1.3. JSFToolbox launches a JVM instance used exclusively by Dreamweaver that is compatible with JDK 1.5 so you can now import JavaBeans and JSF components compiled using Java 1.5 right into Dreamweaver. http://www.jsftoolbox.com/documentation/help/04-UsingComponents/imported-jars.jsf http://www.jsftoolbox.com/documentation/help/04-UsingComponents/other-components.jsf Thanks again for your interest!