According to the documentation, it should be the easiest product in the world to use:
Simply add the icefaces.jar to the application and we have Direct-to-Dom (D2D) rendering applied to the page.
But even their most basic tutorial Getting Started with ICEfaces 2 doesn't appear to work. I downloaded the code at the bottom of the page, built it into a WAR and deployed it to both Tomcat 6.0.32 and Tomcat 7.0.14. The first thing I noticed was that for some reason the composite component didn't work:
/job-applicant.xhtml @39,78 The following attribute(s) are required, but no values have been supplied for them: id.
But that feels more like a JSF issue (JSF 2 Composite component required attribute throws exception), so I resolved that by removing the required on the ID attribute (though there is still a required="true" on value that doesn't seem to have a problem). Anyway, now the app deploys. And as stated, it uses an AJAX call when you click the Clear button that ends up getting the full DOM for the form in the response XML. The next step is to add the icefaces.jar and it is supposed to add the Direct-to-DOM functionality that will ensure only the differences are sent in the response:
ICEfaces 2 renders component markup to a server-side DOM (Document Object Model) that reflects the current client view. Each time the JSF lifecycle runs a DOM comparison is done and, if there are any changes, a concise set of page updates are sent back to the client to be applied to the page. We call this Direct-to-DOM or D2D rendering.
However, I get the full form as a response, plus some additional lines of ICEfaces stuff like this:
<input name="ice.window" type="hidden" value="epgo74zmvc" />
<input name="ice.view" type="hidden" value="vs4ik661" />
So clearly, ICEfaces is doing something, but NOT what it promised. It is actually LONGER than the plain AJAX response. So ignoring the fact that it is actually a larger response, I moved on to the next promise:
With Direct-to-DOM rendering, we no longer need the f:ajax tag nested in our "Clear" button
Sounds straight forward right? In the example on the page, they just move the EL expression for the listener from the f:ajax tag to the h:commandButton tag. The problem there is that the method signatures are different. This is supposed to be the Getting Started tutorial, but it doesn't care to actually walk you through the steps. Anyway, I can fix that, by modifying the method signature of the clearForm method in the backing bean so that its argument is now and ActionEvent instead of AjaxBehaviorEvent. Doing that, ICEfaces does actually replace what would be a full page action with an AJAX action, which is pretty incredible, but I still have a sour taste in my mouth. Does anyone have any idea why the D2D doesn't seem to work? Am I doing something wrong? Should I still try to use ICEfaces?
