Chapter 4 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 7.

Figure 7 ICEfaces TimeZone Application

This tutorial consists of seven 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 basic JSF HTML components in JSP.

Step 2 - Integrating ICEfaces uses the same basic JSF application, converted to JSP Document, running with ICEfaces.

Step 3 - Dynamic Updating-Make the Clocks Tick modifies the application to add ticking clocks and to support separate but concurrent instances of the TimeZone application from multiple web browser windows or tabs.

Step 4 - Dynamic Table Rendering adds a dynamic data table, which can be manipulated by checkboxes, to make the TimeZone application more interactive.

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

Step 6 - Integrating Facelets uses the same JSF application, converted to XHTML, running with ICEfaces and Facelets together.

Step 7 - Capitalize on Facelets uses Facelets functionality to do header inclusion and dynamically generate content from the Java bean.

The seven exercises are organized in the directory structure shown in Figure 8. Prior to starting this tutorial, we recommend that you read Chapter 2, Configuring Your Environment for ICEfaces to ensure that your environment is configured properly to deploy and execute ICEfaces applications on your JEE application server.

Figure 8 TimeZone Tutorial Directory Structure

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