Facelets

Chapter 2. Setting Up the Facelets Development Environment

The first chapter introduced Facelets, and then explained how it works and why you would want to use it. The rest of this book shows you how to build a web application with Facelets. It illustrates the techniques described in each chapter with examples drawn from an imaginary food appreciation web site called GoodEats! To run the examples, you will need to download, install, and configure a Facelets development environment.

2.1 About the Facelets Development Environment

This chapter describes how to set up the Facelets development environment used to build and run the examples. Facelets, like JSF, is technology neutral and extensible. Both Facelets and JSF are based on standards, not particular products. As a result, you can select the components of this development environment from a list of excellent open source projects, such as NetBeans or Eclipse as the IDE; Tomcat or Glassfish as the web container; and Spring or JBoss as the transaction manager. You can use Windows, Unix, or Linux as the operating system. The environment used to develop and execute the examples in this book uses the Microsoft Windows operating system. The development environment software includes JDK 5, MyFaces JSF, JBoss, Eclipse IDE, and MySQL database. It was selected based on its ease of installation and usage, availability, and marketplace acceptance. The reader should view this software as the author's selection from a number of good options and ...