Transcript Web JSF Overview – Internet “101”

®
IBM Software Group
Web JSF Overview – Internet “101” for EGL/JSF Developers
This unit introduces you to the technical concepts of the Internet, for the JSF and EGL
web application development you’ll be learning how to do in these tutorials.
© 2006 IBM Corporation
Course
JSF/EGL Web Page and Site Design
and Development
Units:
 Course Setup
 Web/JSF Overview
 JSF Properties Deep Dive
 Essential JSF Components
 Additional JSF Components
 JSF dataTables
 Page Flow and State Management
 AJAX Controls and JavaScript
 JSF Component Tree and Dynamic Property Setting
 Web-Site Design and Template Pages
 Appendices
 Internationalization
 Page Design Best Practices
 Additional Use Cases
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Unit Objectives
 At the end of this unit, you will be able to:
 Define and describe the following elements of Web Programming:
 EGL and Web Pages- Architectural view
 Terms and concepts in Internet such as URL, HTML, .CSS
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Topic Objectives
 Sub-topics for this section:
Internet “101”
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Lifecycle of a request and response
URL/URI
Browser technology
.CSS
Dynamic Content Web Pages
 Terms and concepts
 JSPs and Servlets
 JSF
– Terms and concepts
– Lifecycle
 EGL and JSF
 Faces-config.xml
RBD JSF/Web/EGL Tooling
 Template pages
 Customizing the palette
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The Internet 101 – Terms and Concepts
 Request/Response Lifecycle:
Uniform Resource Locator
 Connect to a TCP/IP network:
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Through your ISP - internet
Through an intranet/extranet
 Enter a logical URL/URI address –
press “GO” in the browser to make
a request:

www.amazon.com
 A global-database receives the
request
 And resolves the logical address
into a physical address of a server
that can respond to the request by
either:
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Serving a page
Passing the request to an application
that can respond (dynamic data
content web application)
 If a dynamic content application,
your EGL JSFHandler eventually
gets control of the request (through
a JSF framework), and processes it
 And returns data (bound to JSF
components) which end up
processed by the JSF framework
(Java) classes – which emits HTML
and sends a response (reply) back
to the user’s PC
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What’s in a URL (Uniform Resource Locator)
 Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is a technical, internet-term used as a synonym for Uniform
Resource Identifier (URI) – which is used by your browser to access and retrieve:
 Documents, Pages, Graphics
…from a unique address of a network-based application or web server connected to the internet
Here is a sample URI dissected:
http://www.ibm.com
 “http://” tells the web browser to make a request on port 80 of type HTTP.
 “www” tells the browser to connect to a DNS (Domain Name Server) on the world wide web.
 Once connected to the DNS server, the hypertext, or “ibm.com” is resolved to an IP address. This
IP address is returned to the client browser which then makes a direct connection to the web server.
Here is a more interesting URI:
http://localhost:9081/EGLWeb/updatecustomer2.faces?cid=3
• Localhost:9081 = “this computer” listen on part 9081 (defined for WebSphere)
• /EGLweb/ = “the root directory of the application”
• /updatecustomer.faces/ = “launch the JavaBean associated with the managed-bean
“updatecustomer2” defined in faces-config” (note the .faces tells the web server to do this)
• cid=3
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= “pass this JavaBean a request parameter named=cid, assign it the value=3”
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Browser
The browser (Internet Explorer,
Firefox, Netscape, Mozilla, etc.).
Browser software:
 Understands and can render
HTML on the user’s PC
 Understands and can execute
JavaScript – on the user’s
machine (called “client/side”
processing)
 Understands and can execute
AJAX commands on the
user’s machine
 More on AJAX coming up
later in this course
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The Importance of Testing Your Pages Using Different Browsers
 Very important! Note the screen captures below. The page on the left was rendered
in IE 6. The exact same page on the right, rendered using Mozilla’s Firefox.
 In this case, the differences are cosmetic. However, there are documented
operational differences between these two common browsers (obviously a concern!)
IE6 and IE7   FireFox
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Cascading Style Sheet (.CSS file)
Style Class preview
Style Classes
Found under \WebContent\theme\
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 Customize your .CSS File
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Open stylesheet.css
Find the outputText class.
Copy/paste it and change its name to: .outputTextBold
Using Content Assist add the attributes shown within the class
Save your changes: Ctrl/S
Close the .CSS file – from the Content Area
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 Use your new .CSS entry in a page
From Page Designer, open allcustomers.jsp
Select each of the column headers and change its Properties/Classes entry to: outputTextBold
 Run allcustomers.jsp on Server – and note the bold headings for the columns.
i.e. Select allcustomers.jsp, Run As -> Run on Server
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 Optional .CSS Workshop One – Justifying Column Headers In a dataTable
 You’ve noticed that the dataTable column headers are currently center-aligned. What if you
wished to left-or right-justify them? No problem-O. From \WebContent\theme\
 Open stylesheet.css
Scroll to find: .headerClass {
Add to the following new attribute:
text-align: left;
 Run allcustomers.jsp on Server
and note the column heading justification
(We’ve abbreviated FName/LName
in order to show the feature)
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 Optional .CSS Workshop Two – Customizing a Submit Button with a Graphic
You may wish to use images for Submit Buttons. On the updatecustomer.jsp, You can do this in two ways:
1. For complete image/button substitution, simply select the button, and from Properties, specify images:
2. For background image substitution, from the .CSS file,
Add a new entry with background-image as a URL
And note that you may want to change the font and color
.commandExButtonGraphic {
background: url("../images/Login.JPG");
font-weight: bold;
color: #445544;
}
.CSS Entry
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 Optional (advanced) .CSS Topic – Dynamic .CSS File Management
 You may have a scenario where you need to supply an entirely different .CSS file, based on each
individual user’s login preferences (say, if these preferences were stored in the database, each user needs
their own .CSS file). One way of solving this requirement is as follows (also, reads the Notes***)
1. Inside of your application’s .JTPL/.HTPL (template pages), add the following JSP expression (scriptlet):
<%
if ((session.getAttribute("cssFolder") == null ))
{
session.setAttribute("cssFolder","default");
}
%>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href='<%= session.getAttribute("cssFolder") + "/theme/stylesheet.css" %>'
title="Style">
Note that you can put this text near the
top of the file, in Source edit mode
2. In your Login page (.egl), set the “cssFolder” session attribute to the name of a folder that exists under
\WebContent\ which contains the customized artifacts (in our case a \theme\ sub-folder, and stylesheet.css
file
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