What's a WARlet ???

JSFSpy Progress
Today I uploaded a new snapshot of JSFSpy. BTW, I'm keeping the name JSFSpy. Even though I don't like it that much, it's short and to the point. Thanks to those who had other suggestions earlier this year. JSFSpy is super-easy to install. Just drop the JSFSpy core jar into your WEB-INF/lib and you are ready to go. Click here for details.

What's a WARlet ???
In short, a WARlet is a WAR plug-in. It provides one or more Facelet views via a WARlet container and some Servlet 3/JSF 2 magic. A WARlet is neatly packaged in its own jar. The jar contains any xhtml, css, images, and classes that it needs. This provides a module of UI and processing logic that you can add to your WAR with zero configuration.

If you happened to catch my JSFSpy presentation at JSF Summit a couple of weeks ago, you saw a WARlet in action. I'll re-create that demo here. Notice the JSFSpy menu buttons at the top:


I took JSFSpy and bundled the WARlet container along with it. Then I took my EL_Evaluator WARlet jar and dropped that into WEB-INF/lib. Redeploy and Viola!! Now an EL Evaluator button appears in my application on the far right.


The button can launch the EL Evaluator functionality. Here is the EL Evaluator:


So how does the button get added? JSFSpy doesn't know anything about EL Evaluator. It only knows that one or more WARlets might be present. So the button menu has this markup to display a launch button for any WARlets that happen to be there:


So what this all means is that anyone in open-source land can create their own WARlet that plugs into JSFSpy. I'll be posting more about how to create a WARlet in the near future. If you just can't wait to write your own you can browse the JSFSpy source, example code, and WARlet container source.

The only catch is that all this requires Servlet 3.0 and JSF 2.0. Nothing wrong with the bleeding edge, eh?

So long, thanks for all the fish, and have a great holiday!

Stan