In the following article I’m going to show you my first “real world” ClientBehavior and my first impressions from a user’s perspective.

First, some theory. JSF has support for something called “attached objects”. This has been since the very beginning, with Converters and Validators.
Since JSF 2.0, Behaviors have been added to this list. A Behavior, when attached to a component, adds client side scripts to an object. For example, one can imagine a Behavior to do an Ajax request, load some data and show it on the page. This will be a common use case for behaviors. The Expert Group understood this and came up with a specialized AjaxBehavior, which is quite similar to the Ajax4jsf <:a4jsupport /> tag. it adds Ajax functionality to the existing component, without modifying it.

This is ClientBehavior in a nutshell. There are more subtile things to know, see this article by Andy Schwartz for a more thorough explanation of the subject.

From now on, I assume at least basic ClientBehavior knowledge and of course JSF knowledge.

The ValidateBean Behavior
With Java EE 6 we got Bean Validation. And I must admit, I like it a lot. It has a nice declarative language and one ubiquitous model for defining validations for your entire system, from database (generating Bean Validation-aware DDL with JPA 2.0) to UI (the JSF 2.0 BeanValidator, which I implemented for Apache MyFaces. That’s where my enthusiasm started).

But, one validation is missing in the spec (with good reasons of course), namely client side JavaScript validations, to improve usability and decrease server load.

Especially since JavaScript validations are often skipped because of maintenance reasons (validations implemented twice) and we now have a robust platform to implement generic validations, I tried to combine the two new technologies (ClientBehavior and Bean Validation) into one generic JavaScript validator.

The ClientBehavior implementation

This class has some interesting things. First, of course the annotations. @FacesBehavior simply registers the class as a ClientBehavior under the given name, just like how Managed Beans or Converters work. The second annotation defines a @ResourceDependency. A ResourceDependency simply says: “Hey JSF, I generate markup which depends on this file. Make sure it’s available”. And JSF 2.0 responds with: “Okay, I will”.

Also, you probably noticed my ClientBehavior to only understand buttons. That’s right, you need to attach it to a button and it takes care of wiring all field validations in the form.

It also looks for a messages component. This is used later to make sure the JS error messages are positioned the same as the by JSF generated messages. UIMessages applies to the entire view, so I don’t just look in the form. A high performance implementation may choose to start searching near the form, since most messages are positioned there, but that’s way out of scope of this article.

I know, I know, this is not the most elegant piece of code, but it nicely illustrates the point. I simply aggregates as much validation metadata as possible and writes it into one big JavaScript statement. Not that optimal, but high performance implementations may choose to dynamically generate a JS file with all metadata which only needs to be referenced from the inline JS code.

If you’d like to know how to obtain the ConstraintDescriptors (the four method calls in the above snippet), just look for the BeanValidator in the Apache MyFaces SVN. I reused the same code here.

The JavaScript
The JavaScript shown below is part of the static scripts that belong to the ValidateBeanBehavior. It contains the JavaScript code to execute the rules, as passed from the server and, if needed, show the validation errors.

It’s a lot of code, which, in essence, validates all input fields in the given form, according to the given validation rules and shows the user an error if needed. This error is positioned at the same spot as where the UIMessages would have been rendered in case of a server side error. This is a best guess though, because when the messages are not rendered (i.e. on the initial request), there is no marker in the page that I can use for positioning. A more sophisticated implementation could enrich all UIMessages in the page to always write some marker “div” with an ID to the client.

I’m going to skip the rest of the JavaScript. It’s just a bunch of validations and utilities, like utilities to convert Strings to and from Date Objects, based on a SimpleDateFormat pattern. This pattern is part of the generated JavaScript and is obtained by looking at the attached Converters.

Usage in a Facelet
To make the ClientBehavior a bit easier to use, here’s a Facelets taglib which defines a tag for the ClientBehavior (don’t forget to configure the taglib in web.xml or put it in the /META-INF of a JAR).

With the taglib in place, we can use the ClientBehavior, like this:

That’s not too much effort for a client side form validation right? And, these validations are always in-sync with the server side validations.

After a bit of cleanup, I’ll commit the code into the Apache MyFaces Sandbox, so you can download it from there when I’m done.

I’ve been playing a bit with Bean Validation and thought I found an issue: Unit testing a ConstraintValidator. Specifically, parametrized ConstraintValidators.

First, what’s a parametrized ConstraintValidator? Simple, a Validator that takes a parameter to do its job. A simple example is a length validator that takes the minimum and maximum length as parameters and validates if the value is between those two.

Parametrized ConstraintValidators are everywhere, even Bean Validation itself contains them. For example: @Min(length) and @Max(length), but also normal ConstraintValidators, like @NotNull where you can customize the error message. However, this error message parameter is not very interesting with regards to unit testing individual ConstraintValidators, because the message is generated by the Bean Validation framework.

For example, consider this ConstraintValidator, incl. corresponding annotation:

In the future, Bean Validation may become the core mechanism for ensuring correctness in your system. For example, JPA 2.0 leverages Bean Validation annotations to generate additional DDL statements and JSF 2.0 automatically uses Bean Validation when it’s available. Note: JSF 2.0 uses a new concept, called “default validators” to implement this. A default validator is invoked on every input component on a postback.

But, how do we test this stuff? After all, you can’t instantiate an annotation.

I currently have 4 options:

• Using reflection to use a declared annotation
• Custom annotation implementation
• Dynamic proxies
• Mocking, for example using Mockito

Using a declared annotation
The first attempt is shown below. Here, I simply declare the annotation in my test case on a dummy instance field (an annotation doesn’t live on its own) and look it up using reflection. This way, Java takes care of instantiating and initializing the annotation.

I personally quite like this approach. The test data is inside the test case. Unfortunately not in the test method, that would be better, but since you can’t put annotations everywhere in your code, it’s not easy to implement this decently.

So let’s look at the next one…

Custom annotation implementation
Since Java annotations are just a special case of interfaces, they should be fairly straightforward to implement. However, for some reason, I didn’t know this until recently. But it’s actually not different from any other interface implementation. See for yourself.

Nothing special, right? But I don’t really like it. I could have also written it inline, but I don’t like that either:

I think the above one looks like garbage. So this is also a no-go.

Dynamic proxies
Java itself uses dynamic proxies at runtime to instantiate annotations. So why not also use a Proxy to mock the annotation? See for yourself.

However inline, the implementation looks very clumsy. Unfortunately this is probably as simple as it can get, since you DO need to define the inner class.

And it will become even worse when there are multiple parameters on the bean, since you need to check which method is invoked. This will make the implementation even worse.

Mocking using Mockito
But, creating and configuring proxies, isn’t this what mocking libraries do? Exactly, let’s try.

This looks pretty nice. And it scales well with multiple attributes.

I only doubt it will be the nicest solution when the annotations become more complex. I really don’t like annotations that contain annotation parameters. Or even worse, arrays of annotation parameters. But reality is, they exist. And if they exist, they also need to be tested. But, OTOH, people who nest annotations probably don’t mind unreadable unit tests.

In my previous post I wrote about Spring 3.0 and how Spring MVC enables REST services in Spring 3.0. Java EE 6 adds support for RESTfull services by adding JAX-RS to the specification. In this post I will show how JAX-RS 1.1 will make your life easy when writing RESTfull services for JEE 6.

GlassFish v3 is an open source application server and is the first compatible implementation of the Java EE 6 platform specification. To test the examples in this article I will assume that you use GlassFish (or any other JEE6 enabled application server) to run the examples.

Maven2 dependencies

Lets start with the Maven dependencies, you can add them all to the pom.xml of your war. I have also included Sun’s Maven2 repository for downloading the JEE6 dependencies like the javaee-api and Sun’s JAX-RS 1.1 implementation called Jersey.

Both dependencies are scoped as provided because GlassFish already ships with these libraries. In fact, my war file is not bigger than 22kb. JEE6 allowes developers to package full blown JEE application as a web archive file, there is no need for an enterprise archive anymore. This makes JEE6 applications really light weight.

JAX-RS RESTfull services in JEE6

JAX-RS supports configuration through annotations, just like the Spring 3.0 REST annotations. Annotations can be added to both classes and methods. Classes in JAX-RS can be POJO`s. One thing about JAX-RS is that it does not integrate well with other JEE specification, for example the JSR-330 annotations for dependency injection are not supported by JAX-RS (yet), but there is a workaround

Because of the flexibility of JAX-RS it is possible to annotate EJB SessionBean or CDI components with JAX-RS annotations. So when a bean with JAX-RS annotation is packaged in a war file, the annotations are automatically picked up by the JAX-RS implementation (Jersey in this case). Since EJB3.1 SessionBeans and CDI components support all of the dependency injection features offered by JEE6, JAX-RS now does too!

Below is an example JAX-RS annotated class. The goal of this RESTfull service is to expose two methods of the ProductService through a RESTfull interface. The ProductService is injected using the @Inject annotation.

In JAX-RS the @Path annotation is used to map an URI to a REST service. In the example below I’ve defined the @Path annotation on the class, this will map all the URIs starting with /product to this class. I also defined the @ManagedBean (CDI) annotation on the class for the @Inject to work properly.

There are two methods within the service which are annotated with @Path, @GET and @Produces. The @Path is the same as with the class, but in this case it maps URI’s to a method. The URI of a method is relative to URI specified in the @Path annotation
on the class. So the following URLs are mapped in this example:

JAX-WS allowes for mapping HTTP methods like GET, PUT, POST and DELETE to Java methods with the @GET, @PUT, @POST and @DELETE annotations. In this example only the GET method is used. In RESTfull service the HTTP GET is used to retrieve data. To map a GET request to a method you can simply annotate a method with @GET.

The @Produces annotation specifies the Mime-Type of the response data the methods produces. In this example the methods both produce XML data, therefore we need to set the Mime-Type to application/xml. When returning an Object from a method annotated with @Produces, JAX-RS trieds to find an appropriate converter to produces the output. In this case I will use JAXB will to marshall the Objects to XML (see below).

JAXB marshalling

In order for JAXB to marshall the Objects returned, we need to specify JAXB annotations on the Objects returned from the methods.
In this example I’ve added @XmlRootElement to the returned Objects to simply marshall the entire Object to XML.

Adding Jersey to the web deployment descriptor: web.xml

For JAX-RS to work we still need to add a Servlet to the web.xml which maps URL’s to the services. In this case we need to add the JerseyServlet to the web.xml. In the servlet-mapping all /rest/ URL patterns are mapped to Jersey. We can access the REST services using the following URIs: /rest/product/etc.

Conclusion

When building RESTfull services on an JEE6 enabled application server, JAX-RS really makes things easy. You will have to decide for your specific case if you want to use Spring or JAX-RS.

If you have (just like me) been following the Web Beans and Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI) work, you might be thinking (also just like I did): “That CDI is heavily over-engineered”. My “moment of clarity” was a year ago, at DeVoxx 2008.

It was a talk by Pete Muir of JBoss. He was showing a really simple use case and tried to implement it using CDI. The talk was really technology driven and I hated it. Why? Because it wasn’t an improvement compared with the existing technologies. He wrote an application, containing several interfaces, classes (this is not bad) and custom annotations. If the goal was to show some kind of geniosity, it was a good talk. But if the goal was to show how this new technology would make our lives better… then sorry, he failed miserably.

More than a year further, there have been a lot of movements on the CDI front. And, as an Apache MyFaces developer, I’m of course very interested how to use CDI in a JSF 2.0 application. And as an Apache fanboy, I of course prefer Apache software, in this case MyFaces with OpenWebBeans and OpenJPA.

Configuration
Since OpenWebBeans is still under development, you need to do some additional steps to get it to work.

The following POM should get you up and running quickly in Tomcat:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"
         xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
         xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>

    <groupId>org.apache.myfaces</groupId>
    <artifactId>myfaces-example-ebanking</artifactId>
    <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
    <packaging>war</packaging>

    <dependencies>
        <!-- Compile dependencies -->
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.apache.myfaces.core</groupId>
            <artifactId>myfaces-api</artifactId>
            <version>${myfaces-version}</version>
            <scope>compile</scope>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.apache.myfaces.core</groupId>
            <artifactId>myfaces-impl</artifactId>
            <version>${myfaces-version}</version>
            <scope>compile</scope>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.apache.openjpa</groupId>
            <artifactId>openjpa-all</artifactId>
            <version>${openjpa-version}</version>
            <scope>compile</scope>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>commons-digester</groupId>
            <artifactId>commons-digester</artifactId>
            <version>2.0</version>
            <scope>compile</scope>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.apache.openwebbeans</groupId>
            <artifactId>openwebbeans-impl</artifactId>
            <version>${openwebbeans.version}</version>
            <scope>compile</scope>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.apache.openwebbeans</groupId>
            <artifactId>openwebbeans-jsf</artifactId>
            <version>${openwebbeans.version}</version>
            <scope>compile</scope>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.apache.geronimo.specs</groupId>
            <artifactId>geronimo-interceptor_1.1_spec</artifactId>
            <version>1.0.0-EA1-SNAPSHOT</version>
            <scope>runtime</scope>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>javax.annotation</groupId>
            <artifactId>jsr250-api</artifactId>
            <version>1.0</version>
            <scope>compile</scope>
        </dependency>

        <!-- Test dependencies -->
        <dependency>
            <groupId>junit</groupId>
            <artifactId>junit</artifactId>
            <scope>test</scope>
            <version>${junit-version}</version>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>

    <repositories>
        <repository>
            <id>Apache MyFaces beta</id>
            <name>Apache MyFaces beta</name>
            <url>http://people.apache.org/~lu4242/myfaces200beta</url>
        </repository>
    </repositories>

    <properties>
        <myfaces-version>2.0.0-beta</myfaces-version>
        <openwebbeans.version>1.0.0-SNAPSHOT</openwebbeans.version>
        <openjpa-version>2.0.0-M3</openjpa-version>
        <junit-version>4.7</junit-version>
    </properties>
</project>

Note some of the additional dependencies required to run in Tomcat, as opposed to a full blown appserver.

Also, at the moment you need to build OpenWebBeans from source manually. The geronimo-interceptor_1.1_spec dependency will be downloaded to your local Maven repository on a “mvn install”. OpenJPA is not needed for this simple use case, but I use it in my project.

Code
And then, the real code:

public class WebUtils {
    private static volatile String basePath;

    @Produces @Named public String getBasePath() {
        if (basePath == null) {
            basePath = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().getExternalContext().getRequestContextPath();
        }
        return basePath;
    }
}

This class contains a so-called Producer Method. As the name suggests, it produces stuff. In this case, it produces a String with Dependent scope. This means the method will be invoked every time the variable is needed. EL expressions or injection are the most common cases for this.

I’m caching the return value, though it’s not necessary, since getting the context path is pretty cheap.

The view could look like this (snippet):

...
<link href="#{basePath}/style/default.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
...

Another implementation could put the variable into the Application scope, like this:

public class WebUtils {
    @Produces @Named @ApplicationScoped public String getBasePath() {
        return FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().getExternalContext().getRequestContextPath();
    }
}

As easy it might seem, the approaches shown above require some responsibility from the programmer though. With producer methods, it becomes really easy to mess things up. After all, you’re effectively creating globals. Tool support may help you here though. For example, the Dependency Analyzer in IntelliJ IDEA 9.0.1 already contains pretty decent support for JSF 2.0 and CDI. And, knowing the reputation of the JetBrains folks, I’m sure they come up with even more fancy stuff.

A more classic implementation
A more classic implementation could look like the following:

@Named
@ApplicationScoped
public class WebBean {
    private static volatile String basePath;

    public String getBasePath() {
        if (basePath == null) {
            basePath = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().getExternalContext().getRequestContextPath();
        }
        return basePath;
    }
}

I’m not using producer methods anymore. The WebBean is now a CDI-managed bean.

The client code becomes slightly more verbose, but who cares? I’ll put the client code in a generic template anyway!:

...
<link href="#{webBean.basePath}/style/default.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
...

Wrapping up
I haven’t even showed the complete tip of the iceberg. CDI offers several ways to write code and we’ve yet to find out the (anti) patterns.

I would like to point you to the OpenWebBeans documentation for more info, but unfortunately this is still under development. The good news is that JBoss Weld already has extensive documentation.