Saturday, November 01, 2008

ICEFaces 1.7.2 and NetBeans 6.1

I downloaded and installed ICEFaces 1.7.2 and its modules for NetBeans 6.1. My conclusion is that is not ready for primetime on NetBeans.

I would recommend that you read the release notes very carefully. The newest version of ICEFaces is not JSF 1.2 compliant. It needs to run in compatibility mode. This requires you to modify the faces-config.xml and web.xml files. This is a major pain point.

The next thing I noticed is that the design-time implementations are not complete. The ability to visually manipulate the components needs some serious work.

I attempted to do one of the tutorials to create a CRUD application using Netbeans. It was very flaky and did not cover the details adequately. In the end I got the application to deploy, and I could click on the table rows, but it did not work as it did in the tutorial.

I have used ICEFaces in the past and I do like their product in general, but it needs to come up to speed with the rest of the world on JSF 1.2 .Its support for NetBeans needs to have more than token capabilities, and it should account for its compatibility issues without intervention from the end user.

8 comments :

Ferret said...

Just in the last couple of days the CTO of ICEFaces has stepped up to the plate promising to move ICEFaces in as a Woodstock replacement, supposedly with a release sometime this week, so I'm waiting to see what happens there.

John Yeary said...

If they are going to step up to bat, they will need to fix some issues that have been plaguing ICEfaces for a long time. I used ICEfaces in the past, and like the suite.

I have found them to be slower to fix, or update their technology to keep pace with other EE technologies.

I hope that Steve Maryka, CTO ICEfaces, can bring it to the next level.

Ted Goddard said...

You mention a requirement to run in JSF 1.1 compatibility mode; perhaps you are referring to the reference to the context-param com.sun.faces.enableRestoreView11Compatibility in the ICEfaces release notes. We are not aware of any current JSF 1.2 incompatibilities, but have used the parameter in the past to guard against differing behaviour in JSF 1.2 minor releases.

Anonymous said...

You can now get at the Woodstock to ICEfaces migration support here.

Steve

John Yeary said...

I do like transparency.

Steve Maryka mentions migration from Woodstock to ICEFaces, but did not mention that he is the CTO of ICESoft Technologies.

Steve is a part of JSR-314 expert group (JSF 2.0) and has been involved with JSF technologies for a long time. ICESoft and Steve have been valuable contributors to the JSF community.

I would like to note, if you want people to migrate from Woodstock to ICEFaces; please provide better NetBeans support, and adopt technology changes sooner.

Anonymous said...

It's Official - Sun Endorses ICEfaces as Replacement for Woodstock

I was not able to disclose this before today, but Sun is officially endorsing ICEfaces as the replacement technology for Woodstock. You can see the press release here. Also, a NetBeans Blog by John Jullion-Ceccarelli from Sun here.

We look forward to much tighter integration into the NetBeans IDE and Glassfish application server as this relationship matures.

Steve

mcahornsirup said...

IceFaces is still a big fix... absolutely NOT ready for the enterprise. They have a massive marketing but the product is really worse. Developing with IceFaces feels like developing JavaScript back in 1998. X-Browser compatibility - they have never heard of that... After 12 month with IceFaces I'am qualified to say it loud: I hate IceFaces!

John Yeary said...

I am still not sure that ICEFaces is the replacement for Woodstock. There is a list of components that are supposed to be coming to replace existing Woodstock components. That has yet to materialize. I also have had some serious issues with upgrading the ICEFaces libraries (1.8.2) and trying to get the project to peacefully co-exist. If I upgrade, the existing project will not even run.

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