Spring Boot and JSF/Primefaces/Richfaces

Question

I have been in contact with Spring for just a few months now and recently came upon Spring Boot while browsing the guides section. The guides were very easy to complete and made for a good initial grasp of the projects's basic (and awesome) idea, which is to be able to build and deploy enterprise-level applications with minimal configuration while upholding to a wide array of Spring's/JEE's good practices. I am really interested in using Spring Boot for test projects since with it they are so much easier and faster to set up and run and still be very close to my production environment. I am currently trying to build a project with Spring Boot and Primefaces as my view technology of choice, but this setup apparently isn't ready out-of-the-box as is the case with Thymeleaf, for which having its binary in the classpath is enough. I tried including the folowing gradle/maven artifacts, with no success:

primefaces
jsf-api
jsf-impl
el-api

Spring Boot's embedded Tomcat server starts with no apparent errors, but after trying to open a page such as /view in a browser, the embedded server displays the following error message: HTTP Status 500 - Circular view path: would dispatch back to the current handler URL again. Check your ViewResolver setup! (Hint: This may be the result of an unspecified view, due to default view name generation.)

After searching in several different places, I still fail to locate any resources/tutorials on how to set up such a project. Here are the contents of my build.gradle file:

buildscript {
    repositories {
        maven { url "http://repo.spring.io/libs-snapshot" }
    }
    dependencies {
        classpath("org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-gradle-plugin:1.0.0.RC4")
    }
}

apply plugin: 'java'
apply plugin: 'idea'
apply plugin: 'spring-boot'

idea {
    module {
        downloadJavadoc = true
    }
}

group = 'com.hello'
version = '0.0.1-SNAPSHOT'

repositories {
    mavenCentral()
    mavenLocal()
    maven { url "http://repository.primefaces.org" }
}

dependencies {
    compile("org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-web")
//    compile ("org.thymeleaf:thymeleaf-spring4")
    compile group: 'org.primefaces', name: 'primefaces', version: '4.0'

    compile group: 'com.sun.faces', name: 'jsf-api', version: '2.2.2'
    compile group: 'com.sun.faces', name: 'jsf-impl', version: '2.2.2'
    compile group: 'javax.el', name: 'el-api', version: '1.0'
}

task wrapper(type: Wrapper) {
    gradleVersion=1.10
}

My main class:

package com.hello;

import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.EnableAutoConfiguration;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.ComponentScan;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;

@EnableAutoConfiguration
@ComponentScan
@Configuration
public class Application {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(Application.class, args);
    }
}

and my implementation of WebMvcConfigurerAdapter:

package com.hello;

import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.config.annotation.ViewControllerRegistry;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.config.annotation.WebMvcConfigurerAdapter;

@Configuration
public class MvcConfig extends WebMvcConfigurerAdapter {

    @Override
    public void addViewControllers(ViewControllerRegistry registry) {
        registry.addViewController("/").setViewName("view");
        registry.addViewController("/view").setViewName("view");
    }

}

Along with my view.html file (I also tried view.xhtml), these are all the files I created for this project as I'm trying for the minimal setup.

If anyone can see what I'm doing wrong (or not doing at all), help would be much appreciated. Do I need extra files/beans for JSF configuration in this case? If so, where and how should put such files?

This question has also been posted in the official Spring forums: http://forum.spring.io/forum/spring-projects/boot/746552-spring-boot-and-jsf-primefaces-richfaces

EDIT: After including M. Deinum's configuration bean for JSF and removing the WebMvcConfigurerAdapter definition (related to Spring MVC), Spring Boot seems to map requests to the FacesServlet instance, now I get the following error message: HTTP Status 500 - Servlet.init() for servlet FacesServlet threw exception

root cause:

java.lang.IllegalStateException: Could not find backup for factory javax.faces.context.FacesContextFactory

The code for the new JsfConfig bean:

package com.hello;

import com.sun.faces.config.ConfigureListener;
import org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.ServletListenerRegistrationBean;
import org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.ServletRegistrationBean;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Bean;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.ViewResolver;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver;

import javax.faces.webapp.FacesServlet;

@Configuration
public class JsfConfig {

    @Bean
    public FacesServlet facesServlet() {
        return new FacesServlet();
    }

    @Bean
    public ServletRegistrationBean facesServletRegistration() {
        ServletRegistrationBean registration = new ServletRegistrationBean(facesServlet(), "*.xhtml");
        registration.setName("FacesServlet");
        return registration;
    }

    @Bean
    public ServletListenerRegistrationBean<ConfigureListener> jsfConfigureListener() {
        return new ServletListenerRegistrationBean<ConfigureListener>(new ConfigureListener());
    }

    @Bean
    public ViewResolver getViewResolver(){
        InternalResourceViewResolver resolver = new InternalResourceViewResolver();
        resolver.setPrefix("/templates/");
        resolver.setSuffix(".xhtml");
        return resolver;
    }
}

Where is your view.html file? Perhaps it's not finding that file? Have you tried changing the file and view name to something else, say index? — andersschuller
@andersschuller I made copies of the file and tried naming it index.htm in the main, main/resources and main/resources/templates (default for Thymeleaf) directories, if that is the case I might be missing some configuration. — Herick

M. Deinum M. Deinum · Accepted Answer · 2014-03-21T15:11:27

You are using JSF that isn't going to work with Spring MVC both are different technologies. You will have to setup JSF correctly. For this you need to add a FacesServlet and the faces ConfigureListener.This is needed to setup JSF correctly, normally the ConfigureListener would be detected automatically but the embedded versions don't really seem to do that.

@Configuration
public class JsfConfig {

    @Bean
    public FacesServlet facesServlet() {
        return new FacesServlet();
    }

    @Bean
    public ServletRegistrationBean facesServletRegistration() {
        ServletRegistrationBean registration = new ServletRegistrationBean(facesServlet(), "*.xhtml");
        registration.setName("FacesServlet")
        return registration;
    }

    @Bean
    public ListenerRegistationBean jsfConfigureListener() {
        return new ListenerRegistrationBean(new ConfigureListener());           
    }       
}

Something like this. I probably would advice you to disable the auto config for the DispatcherServlet etc. as you are using JSF and not Spring MVC.

@EnableAutoConfiguration(exclude={WebMvcAutoConfiguration.class,DispatcherServletAutoConfiguration }

Spring Boot and JSF/Primefaces/Richfaces

5 Answers