ICEfaces™ Community Edition v1.0.1 Release Notes July 12th, 2006

Overview

• Understanding ICEfaces Community Edition (CE)
• Changes in this release
• Supported browsers, application servers, and tools
• Known issues with this release
• Getting support for ICEfaces
• License information

Understanding ICEfaces Community Edition (CE)

ICEfaces delivers extensions to Java ServerFaces (JSF) that provide an AJAX-enabled rich presentation environment for JSF applications. ICEfaces brings value to any J2EE development project that needs to provide superior presentation capabilities to the web application user. In particular, ICEfaces provides the following features:

• Smooth, incremental page updates that do not require a full page refresh to achieve presentation changes in the application.
• Server-initiated asynchronous presentation updates for dynamic near-real-time data push.
• The ICEfaces Component Suite, a complete rich JSF component suite that fully leverages ICEfaces capabilities.
• Intelligent form processing that facilitates fine-grained interactions with the user as they manipulate a form.
• API support for rapid development of group-aware and collaborative applications, such as Chat, Webcast, social apps., etc.
• JSP or Facelets based development.
• Tool integrations for leading Java IDEs.
  

Learn More

This ICEfaces release comes with extensive documentation that will help you understand the product thoroughly. Documentation for this release is located in your installation directory at .../install_dir/ICEfaces-Community-1.0.1/docs/. The following documents are provided in PDF format:

1. ICEfaces Getting Started Guide: This guide takes you through product installation, environment configuration, demo app installation, and a basic 5-stage tutorial. This guide also contains information related to support for different application server environments and development tools.
2. ICEfaces Developer's Guide: This guide contains information relevant to developing applications with ICEfaces. It describes the ICEfaces architecture, and explains key concepts that the ICEfaces developer should be aware of. It also provides a complete reference guide that covers APIs, configuration, components (including the ICEfaces Component Suite), and TLDs and covers advanced topics like writing Direct-to-DOM renderers for custom components.

Additionally, all ICEfaces documentation is also available on-line at:

http://www.icesoft.com/support/icefaces_docs.html

Changes in This Release

ICEfaces Community Edition v1.0.1 includes over 140 fixes and enhancements.  Click here to review the complete Change Log of changes made between the v1.0 and v1.0.1. releases.

The most notable changes are listed below:

General

• ICEfaces now supports using standard JSF components with ICEfaces Component Suite components in the same JSF application, on different JSP pages. See the ICEfaces Developers Guide for details (JSF Integration - page 18).

• The ICEfaces Component Suite now supports Acegi Security for complete support of the renderOnUserRole and enabledOnUserRole component properties in asynchronous ICEfaces applications. Since ICEfaces makes use of the Acegi Security libraries directly, both the acegi-security-1.0.1.jar and the spring.jar must be located in a webapp-visible area, such as common/lib for tomcat.

• ICEfaces has now been verified against the Sun JSF 1.1_02 runtime.

• ICEfaces has now been verified against the Apache Tomcat v5.5 and IBM WebSphere v6.1 application servers.

ICEfaces Component Suite

• Improved focus management for ICEfaces Component Suite components, including dynamic application-initiated component requestFocus capabilities. Applications can now asynchronously set the focus on specific components without user-action required.  See the ICEfaces Developers Guide for details (Using the ICEfaces Focus Management API - page 30).

• Enhanced inputFile component supports asynchronous uploading of files, enables applications to display progress bars, etc. during file upload process. See Known Issues for details on related limitations when using FireFox/Mozilla browsers.

• New outputStyle component supports linking ICEfaces Component Suite theme CSS styles into pages, and supports browser-specific theme CSS styling.

• MenuBar - top level menuItems can now fire action events and have action listeners associated with them.

Facelets

• ICEfaces Facelets support is now compatible with Facelets v1.1.11.

Example Applications and Tutorials

• A new ICEfaces Component Suite tutorial series is available on the new www.icefaces.org ICEfaces community website. These tutorials explore in-depth the various usage scenarios for many of the ICEfaces Component Suite components.

• A new Integration tutorial series is available that demonstrates integrating ICEfaces within existing JSP-based applications. These tutorials are also available on the www.icefaces.org ICEfaces community website.

Tools

• Sun Java Studio Creator 2 (Early Access 2)
  
• An updated version of the ICEfaces integration for Sun Java Studio Creator 2 (now EA2) is included in this release. It  corrects numerous issues when using the ICEfaces Component Suite components at design-time. For details, please see the Java Studio Creator 2 Integration release notes.
  

• NetBeans v5.0 / 5.5
  
• ICEfaces NetBeans integration provides project-level ICEfaces integration support for developers who use the NetBeans v5.0 or v5.5 IDE for JSF application development.

• Several existing ICEfaces tool integrations have been updated to work with recently updated IDE versions:
  
• Eclipse v3.2 with Web Tools Project (WTP) v1.5.
  
• BEA Workshop Studio for JSF v3.1.
  

Supported Browsers, Application Servers, and Tools

Browsers

J2EE Application Servers

J2EE Integrated Development Environments (IDEs)

Known Issues

The following are known issues with this release:

General

• If the JSF templates for an application are nested within directories, the <jsp:directive.include file="included.jsp"/> will not work properly.  The workaround is to create additional mapping entries in the web.xml descriptor for each directory and specify the included file location from application root.
  

• There are conditions in which the asynchronous communication between the server and browser stops (such as the user pressing the browser "stop" button or allowing their machine to sleep). In this situation, the application server console will show the following exception (including stack trace) with no functional impact:

• If at any time the asynchronous connection between the browser and the server is lost due to a network interruption, reloading the page will generally restore normal operation from the previous application state.

• ICEfaces pages included via <jsp:include> or <tiles:insert> have distinct PersistentFacesContext objects even if they are included by the same parent page. For this reason, application-initiated renders will apply only to the inclusion associated with the particular PersistentFacesContext.

• Inclusion of ICEfaces content from JSP is not compatible with MyFaces.

• Integration of HTML renderers with the ICEfaces Direct-to-DOM renderers is generally possible but idiosyncrasies have been noted with a small number of custom renderers. In these cases, enclosing the custom tag with a standard JSF panelGrid tag in the source document can help to correct the problem.

• Attempting to retrieve a Request parameter in the url using the following syntax is not supported (returns null):
     FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().getExternalContext().getRequestParameterMap().get(paramName);
  A workaround for this issue is to retrieve the Request parameter using the following alternative syntax:
   ((HttpServletRequest)FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().getExternalContext().getRequest()).getParameter(paramName);

• When using ICEfaces with com.icesoft.faces.concurrentDOMViews enabled, reloading the page or opening the application with more than one browser window simultaneously will prevent references to any request-scoped beans from being removed, resulting in them being unable to be garbage collected until the user session expires.
  

JSP Markup

• UIComponentBodyTag processing supports only a single call to doAfterBody(). The full JSP lifecycle for iterative body processing is not supported.

• The first-generation children of the DataTable's table-header and column-header facets must be standard JSF components. For example, plain markup cannot be contained on its own within these facets, it must be wrapped in a panelGrid and the panelGrid, in turn, can be contained within the facet.

• JSP Page to Document conversion escapes &nbsp, but &nbsp in JSP Documents must be manually escaped by the developer as &amp;nbsp. Similarly, & characters must be escaped as &amp;.

• Non-JSF JSP tags (<jsp:xxx/>, etc.) embedded in JSP Pages and Documents are ignored by the ICEfaces parser with the exception of the inclusion mechanism (see Markup Reference in Developer's Guide for details).

• Java code (<% ...%>, etc.) embedded in JSP Pages and Documents is ignored by the ICEfaces parser with the exception of the inclusion mechanism (see Markup Reference in Developer's Guide for details).

• Input documents must be well-formed XML.

• Deprecated HTML elements, specifically the FONT element, do not respond properly to DOM manipulation functions in the ICEfaces client-side JavaScript bridge. (see HTML 4.01 Specification for details on deprecated HTML Elements).

• Pages must contain both a <HEAD> tag and a <BODY> tag so that ICEfaces can properly add a link to its own custom JavaScript library.

• If the JSF tag <f:loadBundle> is used in a parent page and a child page included via <jsp:include /> references the loadBundle's properties, an exception is thrown.

• Any ICEfaces page included from a JSP via <jsp:include/> must contain a <body> tag as the content of the <body> tag is precisely the content inserted into the including page.

• Tiles tags are not supported within ICEfaces pages, but ICEfaces pages may be included via Tiles.

• If multiple ICEfaces inclusions are performed by the same parent JSP, each ICEfaces form must have a manually applied unique ID.

• JSP Pages are dynamically converted to JSP Documents for processing by the ICEfaces parser, so it is important not to mix JSP Page and JSP document types when performing static inclusion.

ICEfaces Component Suite

• All ICEfaces Component Suite components must be enclosed in a JSF form component (i.e. ice:form, h:form, or ui:form).

• Drag & Drop (panelGroup)
  
• In Internet Explorer dragging and holding an image will cause the cursor to change to the not symbol. Operation returns to normal with a second left mouse button click.

• Effects (various components)
  
• In Internet Explorer the Fade, Appear, and Pulsate effects will not transition when used with select elements.
  
• In Safari the Highlight effect will does not work on buttons and lists.

• inputFile
  
• When using Firefox / Mozilla with the inputFile component, if the user interacts with the ICEfaces application while a file is being uploaded, the file-upload operation may terminate abnormally. The ICEfaces application itself will remain functional. In order to avoid this possibility it is recommended that fileUpload operations be performed in a modal panelPopup to prevent user-interaction with the ICEfaces application while the file upload is in progress. For example, the application may display a progress-bar in a modal panelPopup that displays the upload progress while also preventing further user-interaction while the upload is in progress.

• menuBar
  • When a menu is expanded and the user clicks on one of the menu items, and then the same menu is expanded again, the last-clicked menu item will appear with a dashed outline. This is only an issue in the Firefox or Mozilla browser.

• panelPopup
• When using a modal panelPopup it may be necessary to ensure that the body region of the page covers the entire visible region of the document or the component used to block user interaction with the document may not cover the entire page. To accomplish this a surrounding DIV sized to 100% width and height can be used to enclose all content in the document body. For example:
  

  <html><body><div style="width:100%;height:100%;"> ...page content...  </div></body></html> 

• When using a modal panelPopup with this release a known issue exists that allows the user to continue to interact with the page under the modal panelPopup component by using the keyboard to navigate to, and interact with, any components on the page.
  

• panelTabSet
• On Safari browsers only, the layout of the tabs is incorrect, with horizontal spacing between the tabs.
• On Safari browsers only, the tab panel resizes when tabs are selected.

Facelets

• When using an ice:outputDeclaration component in a Facelets document on a JBoss application server, several warning messages may be logged. These warnings do not affect the performance or behavior of the component and can be ignored.

Application Servers

• BEA Weblogic Server 9
• In order to run ICEfaces on the BEA Weblogic Server 9, the html and core tld files located in jsf-impl.jar should be extracted from the jar file and placed into the WEB-INF folder of any application you want to deploy.

• Websphere Application Server 6.0.0.1
• A bug in the application server prevents the Timezone Step 3+ tutorials from running correctly. A WebSphere patch is available from IBM that resolves this issue: APAR numberPQ99195, http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=180&uid=swg1PQ99195.
  
• The Component Effects demonstration in the ICEfaces Component Showcase application doesn't display the effects when hosted on WebSphere v6.0.0.1 server.
   
  
• Tomcat 5.5
• Tutorials bundled with the ICEfaces release will not build and deploy to Tomcat 5.5 with MyFaces due to a conflict related to jsp-api.jar.  To build and deploy tutorials on Tomcat 5.5 with MyFaces, it is necessary to modify the .../install_dir/ICEfaces-Community-1.0.1/tutorial/build.properties and set tomcat55=true prior to building the application.
  

Support

For help with this release, refer to http://support.icesoft.com where you will find the ICEsoft knowledge base including articles, slide shows, and other resources. In addition refer to the ICEfaces Community Edition support forums where you can monitor and participate in discussions on ICEfaces technology, tips, and techniques.

If desired, commercial support options are also available from ICEsoft.

License Notice

License agreements can be found in the .../install_dir/ICEfaces-Community-1.0.1/docs/license directory.

© Copyright 2005-2006. ICEsoft Technologies, Inc.