JSF 2.3 Tip of the Day: Single Select Menu Item Example

One of my new colleagues is new to JSF development, and asked for some assistance in creating a JSF <h:selectOneMenu/> which had a blank option. I came up with a quick example using JSF 2.3 and CDI on GlassFish 5.0.

The web page (index.xhtml) looks like the following:

The backing bean (IndexBean.java) contains the list of items for the menu and the logic to hold the selected value:


All in all a very simple example. I was asked what my dependencies looked like so here is the one last piece.


The NetBeans Maven project can be downloaded here: jsf23-cdi-selectonemenu-example

JAX-RS 2.0 Tip of the Day: Using MOXy and Forms Example on GlassFish 5.0

Glass Fish

I have been tasked with doing some JAX-RS coding during my day job. I wanted to update my skills for JAX-RS which is one of my favorite technologies. I specifically use Jersey which I find very well done and easy to use. As a number of you may know... I am a GlassFish fan too (one just needs to look at my banner). I decided to use my trusty NetBeans 8.2 install to write a quick example.

MOXy is enabled by default if you add the dependency to your Maven project.


This is a great feature, and I wanted to give it a spin instead of using Jackson, or Jettison. The usage was as simple as adding a @XmlRootElement annotation to the model class. The rest was handled automagically.

The entire project including a war file are available on Github: jaxrs-form-data-parameters.

A simple platform independent file is used to setup the application.


We set up web resource (service) to handle our requests.


That's it! You now have a JAX-RS Web Service. The project runs successfully on GlassFish 5.0 (.war file on GitHub).

NOTE: MOXy has some issues running on GlassFish 4.1, 4.1.1, and 4.2.

JSF HTML Whitespace, JS, and CSS Compression

This is the second approach to whitespace removal, JS, and CSS compression. In my article Whitespace Servlet Filter, I mentioned that I tried a number of approaches using htmlcompressor to accomplish this task.

This was my second approach which was to wrap the ResponseWriter in JSF to accomplish this task. The approach worked, but was abandoned before I finished writing some additional code to handle AJAX. This could be easily resolved with code that is similar to that found in Whitespace Servlet Filter.

This approach is very specific to JSF and relies on the project being pure JSF. The filter approach is more flexible in my judgement. I did think it was important to publish the code though on Github.

The code for the project can be found here: jsf-html-compressor.