Annoying NetBeans 6.0 Facelets Support Issue on Tomcat

Yesterday i got a call from a good friend of mine who has been dipping his fingers into JSF a bit. He’d decided to jump ship to using JSF on XHTML files, a technology known as Facelets. So he goes to download NetBeans 6.0 Facelets support plugin and installs it.

After developing a simple facelets page, he decides to deploy it to Tomcat 6.0.14 only to get BIG FAT class loader exceptions. What better way to treat a sceptic who is just getting into the game of web development in Java. These are the kind of things that can be so annoying about doing something in Java. Being a Seam advocate and user, I didn’t immediately realise what could have been the problem, since my Seam applications run fine using the jars from Seam.

After doodling around and making some changes to jars that came with the Facelets support, i just decided to ditch the jars from Facelets support and use my own. I picked the jars that come with Seam and VOILA! Problem solved. Makes me wonder if the guys who developed the plugin didn’t try to deploy it themselves AT LEAST to Tomcat before putting it out there. Anyways i just felt like putting up the solution to this simple but very annoying problem here for the sake of those who might try an introduction to Facelets.

Note that i got these jars from the JBoss Seam 2.0.GA’s lib folder. I can’t tell you where u can get them individually but downloading seam altogether will give you a change to start playing around with it if you haven’t started already.

Simply create a new Library in NetBeans by going to Tools->Libraries. I gave mine the name Facelets4Tomcat. Here are the jar files you need.

• commons-beanutils.jar
• commons-collections.jar
• commons-digester.jar
• commons-logging.jar
• jboss-el.jar
• jsf-api.jar
• jsf-facelets.jar
• jsf-impl.jar

This goes into your web.xml file.

<context-param>
<param-name>com.sun.faces.validateXml</param-name>
<param-value>true</param-value>
</context-param>
<context-param>
<param-name>javax.faces.DEFAULT_SUFFIX</param-name>
<param-value>.xhtml</param-value>
</context-param>
<context-param>
<param-name>facelets.DEVELOPMENT</param-name>
<param-value>false</param-value>
</context-param>
<context-param>
<param-name>facelets.SKIP_COMMENTS</param-name>
<param-value>true</param-value>
</context-param>
<servlet>
<servlet-name>Faces Servlet</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>javax.faces.webapp.FacesServlet</servlet-class>
<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>

<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>Faces Servlet</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>*.jsf</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
<session-config>
<session-timeout>
30
</session-timeout>
</session-config>
<welcome-file-list>
<welcome-file>forward.jsp</welcome-file>
</welcome-file-list>

If you want to add the Ajaxified RichFaces components then add the following from the same Seam lib folder.

• richfaces-api.jar
• richfaces-ui.jar
• richfaces-impl.jar

And add these to the top of your web.xml file

<filter>
<display-name>RichFaces Filter</display-name>
<filter-name>richfaces</filter-name>
<filter-class>org.ajax4jsf.Filter</filter-class>
</filter>
<filter-mapping>
<filter-name>richfaces</filter-name>
<url-pattern>*.jsf</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>
<context-param>
<param-name>org.ajax4jsf.SKIN</param-name>
<param-value>classic</param-value>
</context-param>

You may use a different skin if you want. Check out the documentation for details

You may then add the library you created to your project by right clicking your web project and selecting “Properties”. At Libraries, click “Add Library” and selected the library you just created. Make sure that the check box is enabled or else it will not put the jar files in the right location i.e. WEB-INF/lib.

Oh, and MAKE SURE that the Facelets support libraries are unchecked, or else you’ll be back to square 1.

Happy Faceleting.