Appliweb

Following the first post about « using Netbeans for an IDEA user », I would like to add some more informations about maven support.

Skipping unit tests:

Each time I compile my maven project in Netbeans, it runs the unit tests, even for small changes. Fortunately, you can easily tell Netbeans to avoid unit test during compilation. Simply right-click on the project, then select Properties. You can check the « Skip tests » control like in the dialog above:

Importing a maven Web project:

I have successfully opened a Maven project that generates a .war file into Netbeans. It is recognized as a web project, you simply by sets the target application server, and then you can run and debug your web application.

It generates the .war file using Maven, and deploys it automatically to the application server.

The neat feature with Web projects:

It’s easy to use, and great for day-to-day web development: It’s tedious to wait for Maven to generate the war and deploys it each time you modify a .jsp or a .xhtml page. So Netbeans automatically deploy the webapp resources files when you save them. Great ! And IDEA does it too.

A Web Designer

My business is to develop web applications in Java.

I would like to talk about a simple business application I do, where users insert / review data from a database.
We choose the standards librairies: JSF-Seam-Hibernate with RichFaces as the U.I. components.
This time, we were lucky enough to hire a web designer ! Big Time !

Let me share with you some of the things I’ve learned working with him.

Organization

First, how the development was organized ?

1. The web designer write the screens in jpg using Photoshop and  Illustrator

2. After several round-trip with the client, the « final » version eventually emerges

3. The web designer then writes the pages in HTML / CSS with the same look and feel

4. I develop a basic JSF page with the Seam backing beans. It only displays the needed information

5. We incorporate its HTML / CSS  into my JSF pages.

The last step is the  tricky one, so let me update with the problems we encountered….

HTML to JSF

CSS problems

The web designer of course came with it’s own set of css styles, with it’s own way of creating the page structure and graphics.
However, the RichFaces JSF library comes with it’s own set of css styles and page structure.

For example, the datatable component generates an HTML <table>, whereas the web designer was expecting <div>. We overcome this problem by changing its HTML with <table>. It’s quite understandable to use a <table> for displaying tabular data in HTML. It’s only by using <table> to position precisely elements that you make a mistake.

Aligning text with images.

Next problem : « align » attribute is not generated by the JSF graphicImage component.
Of course, our web design uses this attribute to align text with image…. Once again, the web designer changed it’s page design to support this. It is now better to use CSS to do this anyway.

A damned simple button

This one is really scary. The web designer don’t use <input type= »submit » /> in it’s forms, but <button>.
Never seen this tag anywhere, but it’s a standard one.

The web designer used it to enable the rollover effect, and to insert <span>…</span> around the text to apply images in the button via css. It’s button was: <button type= »submit »><span><span><span>Submit</span></span></span></button>
I haven’t seen any JSF library with a command button generating HTML.

Of course, you can tell me to create one new JSF Component, but common, I’ve already created some, and it’s way too complex for a simple button ! I have to rewrite the HTML renderer, manage all the subtle things in the implementation…
Currently, our solution is to created a javascript code (called using click event) to submit the form. Not very nice.

Conclusion

We’ve done only the first page of our application, and I’m really wondering if we took the right library. I believe now that in case you have a web designer in your team, you shouldn’t use libraries that generate HTML for you, like JSF or gwt, but instead use a framework allowing to generate the precise HTML the designer wants (maybe Tapestry, or plain JSP ?)