J2EE Integrated Development Environments

ICEfaces supports the most popular Java IDE tools for web-application development, such as Eclipse, Oracle JDeveloper, Sun Studio Creator, and IBM Rational Application Developer. Refer to the ICEfaces CE Release Notes for a list of application servers supported in this release.

This release of ICEfaces includes tool integration bundles located in the /tools directory for several IDE tools.

Because IDE Tool support for ICEfaces is evolving rapidly and support for additional tools and features is ongoing, please refer to the ICEfaces Tools Support topic in the ICEsoft Knowledge Base for the most current tools support information and downloads.

ICEfaces tool support can be described in terms of the following:

1. Manual project-level ICEfaces integration: This is the most basic level of support in that it is possible to develop and run and test ICEfaces-enabled JSF projects using the IDE tool, but to do so requires the developer to manually integrate the necessary JAR files and alter other configuration files by following the generic integration instructions in the ICEfaces documentation.

2. Adding a new ICEfaces-enabled JSF project by importing an ICEfaces project template WAR file:In cases where the IDE tool supports the import of existing WAR files, the user can import an ICEfaces JSF project WAR file that will result in a new project being created that is already configured for ICEfaces support. The user would then need to edit the configuration files to incorporate any application specific content. In addition, the ICEfaces demonstration applications can be installed into the IDE by importing their WAR files.

3. Creating a new ICEfaces-enabled JSF project with a New Project Wizard: For some IDE tools, ICEfaces provides a wizard-like extension for the IDE tool that enables developers to easily create new ICEfaces-enabled JSF projects. The wizard will automatically include the necessary ICEfaces JAR files to the project classpath and create and/or alter the project configuration files as required.

4. Converting an existing web application project to an ICEfaces-enabled JSF project: In this scenario, it is assumed that the developer already has a JSF or other web application project created in the IDE and subsequently wants to ICEfaces-enable it. A new ICEfaces JSF project may also be created by creating a standard JSF or web application project using the IDE tool's default project creation wizard and then running the ICEfaces integration wizard on the newly created project.

Note: Not all IDE tools support all integration types. See the detailed documentation included with each ICEfaces Tool Integration bundle for specifics on which integration features are supported.