Question

I have been investigating a JSF upgrade on our existing web apps that are using JSF 1.2 & tomahawk 1.1.9 & no facelets , to use JSF 2.0 & tomahawk 1.1.9

This is my findings sofar :

• All the tomahawk components worked except for t:dataTable used with a t:dataScroller – BUT ONLY IF preserveDataModel=”true” on t:dataTable.

• The workaround is to set preserveDataModel=”false”

  -Why it breaks is explained here :
  http://www.mail-archive.com/[e-mail]/msg40741.html

• The impact of changing preserveDataModel=”true” to preserveDataModel=”false” is explained here :
  http://wiki.apache.org/myfaces/Working_With_DataTable_And_PreserveDataModel

• Existing JSF 1.2 tags still works under JSF 2.0 runtime

Have anyone else out there done something similar – and what is your experience ?

I have searched the web high and low but could not found much on this topic , but at the moment I am feeling pretty confident to get the new libraries out to the testing environment for a couple of weeks & then onto a live environment.

Answer 1

Actually, the library vendor is responsible for testing. You should also not download libraries which are not explicitly mentioned to be JSF 2.0 compatible. If I peek the Tomahawk site, there’s no word about “JSF 2.0”, only 1.1 and 1.2. So you shouldn’t expect that it will work flawlessly on JSF 2.0.

The only libraries which are JSF 2.0 compatible are as far RichFaces 3.3.3, PrimeFaces 2.0, OpenFaces 2.0, Apache Trinidad 2.0 and the (currently still in Alpha stage) IceFaces 2.0.

This site used to provide a great overview, but it’s currently outdated. The author has to catchup some major changes yet.

---

To my personal experience, the major reasons to use Tomahawk were the t:dataList, t:dataTable preserveDataModel="true" and t:saveState, but with JSF 2.0 on Facelets they are all superfluous and replaceable by ui:repeat, and @ViewScope. So I don’t see any reason to stick to Tomahawk, or it must be the t:selectOneRadio layout="spread".