JamesBranam's Blog

Project Dynamic Faces Component Library

Hi all,

There is a nice little component library on the Update Center that you can download if you want to add Ajax functionality to your web application: the Project Dynamic Faces component library. Summarizing the description of Dynamic Faces by Jennifer Ball and Ed Burns:

Project Dynamic Faces is another way to add Ajax functionality to a JavaServer Faces technology-based application. The component library adds Ajax functionality to the JavaServer Faces components in your web application. There is no need to change your components (or rewrite them) to give them the power of Ajax.

To add this Ajax functionality to your web application, you must first identify which parts of your application you want the Ajax functionality to update. As developers working with JSF components already know, a JSF page is represented by a tree of components. With Projects Dynamic Faces, you can determine which components should benefit from asynchronous updates. Just as you use Ajax functionality to update one part of the HTML DOM tree that represents the page, you would use Project Dynamic Faces to update one part of the component tree that represents a JSF page.

And adding to all this, Dynamic Faces allows you to use Ajax capabilities in a more efficient way. JavaScript technology events on some page components can cause asynchronous updates of other components, and Dynamic Faces allows this to occur as a result of only one Ajax request to the server, which reduces the server load.

Dynamic Faces also lets you manage client-side and server-side states efficiently. When Dynamic Faces updates component states on the client, it updates only the state that changes, leaving the rest of the tree intact. Dynamic Faces does all this behind the scenes, in a manner that is completely consistent with the JSF life cycle.

Project Dynamic Faces utilizes the runtime extensibility of JSF technology by adding Ajax functionality to standard JavaServer Faces 1.2 functionality.

They're there waiting for you. So get started!

--James

Posted at 09:00AM Sep 01, 2008 by branajam in NetBeans  |  Comments[3]