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dev2dev: Integrating JavaServer Faces with Beehive Page Flow
BEA's dev2dev site has posted "Integrating JavaServer Faces with Beehive Page Flow," an article documenting how you can replace JSF's "very basic navigation handler" with Beehive, the BEA-contributed "full-featured navigation handler" that integrates with Struts.
The summary of the article:This article has shown how to pair the richness of JSF for building pages with the power of Beehive Page Flow for controlling navigation between pages. While integrating the two is easy, it has a profound impact on your application: It separates your JSF pages from application-level logic, and brings the pages into the world of features that Page Flow provides. A JSF page gains a clear mission: participate in the flow of an application as a single (if highly capable) view element. What I haven't shown here is a fully fleshed out application, with event handling in JSF pages and complicated navigational logic in the controller. But the more complex an application gets, the more it demands the separation of responsibilities and advanced flow features that Page Flow adds to JSF. Spend a few minutes trying it out—it doesn't take long to start realizing the benefits.
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Message #197194
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dev2dev: Integrating JavaServer Faces with Beehive Page Flow
Good article.
I checked out some of the Beehive sample code and I like the idea of a more advanced view controller for JSF but is it really fair to say that JSF has only a "very basic navigation handler"?
From my experience the ability to link an output page to the outcome of an action method covers 80-90% of what I would expect from a view controller. In this regard, JSF is as full-featured an MVC framework as Struts.
So what value does Beehive add? I gather that you can assemble a set of pages to be processed as a page flow, which is the beginning of adding business process management and workflow support to JSF.
My other concerns include the apparent lack of an XML configuration file for navigation design and hard-coding URLs in annotations.
In my experience, XML is cleaner, more human-readable, and more straightforward to edit than annotations but I admit I have not worked extensively with this new Java 5.0 feature.
One of the issues in a view-intensive Web application, i.e. one that has many pages, is how changes to the information architecture will impact application logic.
As a developer you expect a certain amount of freedom to refactor your code, make API changes, and so on. User interface designers (including Web authors) should also be free to make changes to the view to accommodate users.
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Message #197383
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dev2dev: Integrating JavaServer Faces with Beehive Page Flow
Great questions...
Good article.I checked out some of the Beehive sample code and I like the idea of a more advanced view controller for JSF but is it really fair to say that JSF has only a "very basic navigation handler"? From my experience the ability to link an output page to the outcome of an action method covers 80-90% of what I would expect from a view controller. In this regard, JSF is as full-featured an MVC framework as Struts. So what value does Beehive add?
I do think the default NavigationHandler in JSF is very basic -- you can attach code or a path to an outcome, but that's about it. There's not really a separate and configurable navigation tier. Some of the things Beehive Page Flow adds in this department:
- Declarative exception handling and validation, through annotations.
- Automatic management of state related to the navigation tier (instantiation/storage/cleanup of the JavaBean that is the controller).
- Inheritance of configuration (by defining an inheritance model for annotations -- this way, you inherit logic, state and metadata).
- "Nested page flows" -- the ability to run an entire flow (set of actions/pages) in the middle of another one, with the original one's state preserved until the nested one ends.
- Symbolic navigation, optional tracking of recent pages and the most recent action, which can be redisplayed/rerun without using explicit paths. Useful especially with nested flows.
My other concerns include the apparent lack of an XML configuration file for navigation design and hard-coding URLs in annotations.In my experience, XML is cleaner, more human-readable, and more straightforward to edit than annotations but I admit I have not worked extensively with this new Java 5.0 feature.
Beehive certainly is based on the idea of attaching metadata directly to code. You can still edit the generated Struts config XML if you need to, but assuming it's not important to be able to change config on the fly in a production-deployed application, annotations give you a single place to edit code and config. I really do agree that the Java annotation model isn't so human-readable; I like XDoclet-styla annotations much better. But I strongly believe that the benefits of annotations (keeping code/config in one place, not to mention toolability) outweigh their drawbacks (harder to edit config in a deployed application, somewhat nasty syntax).
One of the issues in a view-intensive Web application, i.e. one that has many pages, is how changes to the information architecture will impact application logic. As a developer you expect a certain amount of freedom to refactor your code, make API changes, and so on. User interface designers (including Web authors) should also be free to make changes to the view to accommodate users.
I think that the more powerful the controller layer -- the more of the controller logic that's removed from the view -- the more view-tier freedom you have.
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Message #197399
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Migration path for existing Page Flow users
I haven't found any documentation about migrating from current Page Flow implementations (WLS 8.1).
Has anyone tried to migrate? Were there any issues? If so, could you elaborate?
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Message #197525
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Migration path for existing Page Flow users
Workshop 9.2 (Spring 2006) will include a code migration tool to import old 8.1 application to Eclipse-based workshop 9.2 .
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