Chapter 1 ICEfaces Tutorial: The TimeZone Application

Chapter 1 ICEfaces Tutorial: The TimeZone Application

This tutorial guides you through a series of exercises that takes a basic JavaServer Faces application and transforms it, using ICEfaces, into a much more dynamic application with an enriched user experience. The tutorial begins with a simple web application called TimeZone and demonstrates how to build the ICEfaces-enriched application, shown in Figure 1-1.

Figure 1-1 ICEfaces TimeZone Application

From this tutorial, you will learn how to:

Take an existing JSF application and migrate it to run with ICEfaces.
Add dynamic asynchronous updates to cause clocks to tick in the application.
Add a dynamic data table that is customized through a set of selection checkboxes.
Stylize the application to produce a professional look and feel.

This tutorial consists of five steps with increasing levels of richness, each designed to demonstrate ICEfaces capabilities:

Step 1 - Basic JSF TimeZone Application shows a basic JSF application built entirely from JSF HTML basic components and XHTML.

Step 2 - Integrating ICEfaces uses the same basic JSF application migrated to run with ICEfaces. For this step, no application source code changes are required.

Step 3 - Dynamic Updating-Make the Clocks Tick modifies the application to add ticking clocks and support separate but concurrent views of the TimeZone application from the same browser.

Step 4 - Dynamic Table Rendering adds a dynamic data table to make the TimeZone application more interactive.

Step 5 - Applying Styles demonstrates how to add formatting and styles to enhance the look of the TimeZone application.

The five exercises are organized in the directory structure shown in Figure 1-2. Prior to starting this tutorial, we recommend that you read ICEfaces Getting Started, to ensure that ICEfaces is installed properly and that your environment is configured properly to deploy and execute ICEfaces applications on your J2EE application server.

Figure 1-2 TimeZone Tutorial Directory Structure