Examples Application

NOTE: See the updated documentation in our Confluence Wiki

Your first step with Apache MyFaces should be to have a look at our examples application. You can do that by going to our working distribution on http://www.irian.at/myfaces.jsf or by deploying the examples application yourself. All you need to do to get up and running is to follow the steps below!

What you need for the Examples Application

• Tomcat 5.x. Download here.
• MyFaces examples. Latest milestone webapp archive (tomahawk-X.X.X-examples.zip or tomahawk-X.X.X-examples.tgz) is here.

Installing and Running the Examples

• Unpack the MyFaces examples archive tomahawk-X.X.X-examples.zip (or tomahawk-X.X.X-examples.tgz) to a directory of your choice.
• Remove any previous MyFaces webapps from your Tomcat installation and clean up your Tomcat work dir. Also make sure that there is no jsf-api.jar or jsf-impl.jar (i.e. Suns API and implementation) in the classpath or in one of Tomcat's lib directories (common/lib or shared/lib).
• Copy the file simple.war (or any of the other example war-files) to the webapps dir of your Tomcat installation directory - and check once more that there is no old myfaces-examples directory there ;-)
• Start Tomcat, if its not already running.
• Start your browser and enjoy it at http://localhost:8080/simple

Installing and Running Sun JSF-RI Samples with MyFaces

• see detailed description

Using MyFaces in your own web application

Suggested step:

• Check the myfaces wiki for information about compatibility with your servlet container.

There are three possible ways to start off with MyFaces, one (recomended) is to start using myfaces archetypes:

• Download and Install Maven
• Execute mvn archetype:create goal using one available archetype. For more info you can look here

The second possibility is to start from the example-app:

• If you want to have it simple, take the tomahawk-X.X.X-examples.zip you downloaded before for looking at the examples, and extract the blank.war file (MyFaces binary)
• Rename the blank.war file to blank.zip, and extract this file - you have a working directory structure for a MyFaces application at hand after this step.

The third possibility is to download the core implementation and/or tomahawk (dependent on if you want to use the RI and the tomahawk components, or only MyFaces), and start from there:

• Alternatively, download the latest MyFaces binary release. You can download only the implementation (aka core) or the implementation and tomahawk.
• Copy all *.jar files into your WEB-INF/lib directory. Some of the jar-files are optional, you can find more info on: http://myfaces.apache.org/impl/dependencies.html and http://myfaces.apache.org/tomahawk/dependencies.html

After you have downloaded the necessary packages and setup your project hierarchy, do this:

• Make sure that there is no jsf-api.jar (i.e. Suns API implementation) in the classpath or in one of your container's shared lib directories (e.g. common/lib or shared/lib for Tomcat).
• Configure your webapp's web.xml file (see conf/web.xml for example and documentation)
• Add the following lines to your JSPs:

• <%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html" prefix="h"%>

• <%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core" prefix="f"%>

Using the MyFaces extensions (aka Tomahawk) in your own web application

• If you don't use the MyFaces implementation, you will need to add the file tomahawk.jar and its dependencies (see above) to your web-app directory.
• To be able to use the MyFaces extensions (aka Tomahawk) add the following line to your JSPs:

• <%@ taglib uri="http://myfaces.apache.org/tomahawk" prefix="t"%>

• <%@ taglib uri="http://myfaces.apache.org/wap" prefix="wap" %>

For using the Tomahawk components, it's also very important to setup the MyFaces Extensions-Filter. You find the explanations for doing this under: http://myfaces.apache.org/tomahawk/extensionsFilter.html

Tutorials for getting started with JSF

• Core-Servlets JSF Tutorial by Marty Hall