Review: Apache MyFaces Trinidad 1.2 – A Practical Guide By David Thomas
Apache MyFaces Trinidad 1.2 by David Thomas introduces the Trinidad framework and shows how it can be used in combination with the Seam Framework to provide a “comprehensive and effective technology for the development of powerful rich-client web applications”.
The book is comprised of 12 chapters. The first 4 chapters primarily provide useful background information whereas the remaining 8 chapters provide lots of source code examples showing how to use Trinidad with Seam.
In the first few chapters, the author introduces Trinidad and explains why it could be used for development of Rich Internet Applications. He describes several reasons for choosing Trinidad such as the wide range of components (“well over 100”), the framework's interoperability and its maturity.
The author also introduces Seam early on in the book, but there is very little discussion about how to configure and get started with Seam. I think that some prior knowledge of Seam would be useful before reading this book.
After discussing Seam, the author continues to introduce Facelets and its templating facilities. Facelets is a JSF view technology that now a standard technology with JSF 2. In the book however, the author concentrates on JSF 1.x. As with the Seam discussions, I would have liked a deeper discussion on Facelets, but as this is not the major subject of the book I can understand why this is not included.
Moving on, the author begins to discuss Trindad in further detail by discussing the most commonly used tags and attributes for the different components and how Trinidad allows Pages to be partially rendered. Partial Page Rendering (PPR) is Trinidad’s AJAX technology that allows only sections of pages to be rendered based upon events such as button clicks within a web page.
The main detailed content (from a code point of view) begins in Chapter 5 where the groundwork for developing Trinidad / Seam applications begins. This chapter details how Seam applications can be built using the SeamGen tool and then imported into Eclipse. The author shows how to modify a standard SeamGen application to use Trinidad instead of RichFaces – RedHat’s competing JSF component framework.
The remainder of the book provides in depth code coverage on how to use different Trinidad components to build web application. The author describes the Trinidad dialog framework, how to build panels, and forms and how to use many different basic Trinidad components, such as text fields, number fields, trees and tables.
Finally, the author provides details on using Trinidad to generate charts and graphs, wizards and popup dialogs – features that are not available with all JSF component libraries.
This book is a good introduction to Apache MyFaces Trinidad 1.2. Packt Publishing describe the book as being written for “Java Developers who are beginners at JSF and experiences web developers who are looking for an introduction into the world of open source JSF technology”. I would agree with this sentiment, but would also recommend prospective readers have at least a basic knowledge of Facelets and Seam before enjoying the book.
Further information about this book can be obtained from Packt Publishing.
