Now you can extend your non-visual web project to Visual Web JSF project

Since Sun released Visual Web Pack for NetBeans 5.5 near end of 2006, lots of users asked whether they can extend their regular non-visual web project to use this visual editor. The answer is now no longer 'NO'!

Visual Web is now fully integrated with NetBeans web project in NetBeans 6.0. Unlike in NetBeans 5.5 or 5.5.1, you no longer see an individual project type Visual Web Application under the Web category when you create a new project. Instead, you use the standard Web Application type to create your new web project and after 2 'Next' clicks, check the Visual Web JavaServer Faces under the Frameworks step.

This Web Project integration also means that; Visual Web will support all the NetBeans web project functionalities that Creator and Visual Web Pack users long eager want to see like,

• More Server support: Sun Application Server/GlassFish, Tomcat, JBoss Application Server, and BEA WebLogic Server.
• Add to Enterprise Application: Lets you specify an existing enterprise application to which the web application will be added as a module.
• More available New File support: Since Visual Web is now a standard web project plug-in, all supported web project templates are now also available to Visual Web project.
• Latest web project features and bug fixing: Visual Web is no longer a forked project type from the standard web project, Visual Web users will always get the latest available web project features and receive the latest and fastest bug fixing.
• ...

Still not impressed yet! OK, here is one that may encourage non-visual web developers start to migrate their web applications to use the visual JSF editor that is now available in the new Visual Web JSF framework.

Besides creating your Visual Web support web project by the above start-from-scratch steps, there are two ways to 'upgrade' your non-visual web project to use these Visual Web stuffs. Just right click on your regular web project and select Properties, under Frameworks category use Add... to add the Visual Web JavaServer Faces framework.

After clicked on the OK button, a default empty Visual Web page 'Page1.jsp' will be created for your web project in addition to all of the framework setup. Now you can link this new visual-editor-support JSF page to your non-visual JSP or HTML pages by adding:

<a href="./faces/Page1.jsp">JavaServer Faces Welcome Page</a>

The second even simpler way is to just add a Visual Web JSF Page to your regular web project. Right click on your regular web project and select New -> Others..., under Web category and choose Visual Web JSF Page file type. Then the Visual Web JavaServer Faces framework will be added into your web project with the Visual Web page name you selected.

You can try all of the above features by visiting the NetBeans IDE 6.0 Preview page and download the new IDE from there.

Posted at 04:05PM May 10, 2007 by poting in Sun  |  Comments[6]