MyFaces JSF and GridSphere

Recently I received an email from someone who was trying to create a JSF portlet for GridSphere. This person was looking for some advice. I have only encountered one major problem with developing JSF portlets for GridSphere and that is that in GS 2.1.x MyFaces JSF portlets create invalid default id's for JSF components. The problem is that in this version of GridSphere, RenderResponse.getNamespace() returns an identifier with a "#" character in it, which is an invalid character for JSF component ids. Jason discusses this issue in the gridsphere-dev mailing list.

The simple workaround to this problem is provide id's for each of your JSF components. Here's a snippet of the kind of JSF template that works with GS 2.1.x:

<!-- FIXME: GridSphere "malformed autogenerated id" issue Below several JSF components have been given unique id's to workaround this issue in GridSphere 2.1.x. This bug has been fixed in GridSphere 2.2.x, but we're not currently using 2.2.x. Once we do move to 2.2.x we can remove all id's that are prefixed with "gsid_" -->

<f:view>
<h:form id="gsid_wrapperForm">
<h:outputtext id="gsid_greetingOT" value="Hello, #{Workspace.userFullName}, you are in your Personal Workspace">
</h:outputtext></h:form></f:view>
...

However, that gets very tedious. Fortunately this problem is fixed in GS 2.2.x, but we're not in a position in the LEAD Project to move to 2.2.x at this time (in fact, I'm holding out for GS 3.0). So I've hacked myfaces 1.1.4 to change the "#" character to "_hash_" when it gets such a value in the returned namespace. The modified jar is available in the Extreme Lab maven repository. Also, if you are using Maven 2, you can use:

<dependency>
<groupId>org.apache.myfaces.core</groupId>
<artifactId>myfaces-impl</artifactId>
<version>1.1.4-gs</version>
</dependency>

to specify the dependency, and you'll need to add the extreme repo in your <repositories> list:

<repository>
<name>Extreme Maven2</name>
<id>extreme.repo.maven2</id>
<url>http://www.extreme.indiana.edu/dist/java-repository</url>
<snapshots>
<updatePolicy>daily</updatePolicy>
</snapshots>
</repository>

This has come in very handy now that I've begun working with Facelets, which I am very happy with.

Using Maven's deploy:deploy-file to import 3rd party jars

Maven - Guide to deploying 3rd party JARs to remote repository

Usually I just manually copy in third party jars to our Maven repository when they come by, but recently I decided to give Maven's own tools a try. In this example, I'm deploying a MyLEAD jar Scott Jensen has sent my way:

mvn deploy:deploy-file -DgroupId=mylead  -DartifactId=mylead-crosscut-attr \
-Dversion=1.0  -Dpackaging=jar -Dfile=./mylead_crosscut_attr-1.0.jar  \
-Durl=scpexe://rainier.extreme.indiana.edu/l/extreme/java/repository

And here, I deploy it again, but this time as a Maven1 type artifact, to support Maven1 clients:

mvn deploy:deploy-file -DgroupId=mylead  -DartifactId=mylead-crosscut-attr \
-Dversion=1.0  -Dpackaging=jar -Dfile=./mylead_crosscut_attr-1.0.jar  \
-Durl=scpexe://rainier.extreme.indiana.edu/l/extreme/java/repository \
-DrepositoryLayout=legacy