Monday, January 5, 2009

JSF 2.0 and the upcoming GA release of JSFUnit

I don't work on JSFUnit full time. A big part of my responsibility at JBoss/Red Hat is to make sure that JSF and Seam integrate nicely with the JBoss Application Server.

So I've been looking at the JSF 2.0 Public Review release. Using JSF 2.0 with JBoss AS 4.2 and AS 5.0 seems to be just a matter of replacing jsf-api.jar and jsf-impl.jar. I'm sure that I'll come across some things that need more/better integration. And when I do, I'll have to implement something new. But for now I'm happy to be able to play with the JSF 2.0 PR release as-is on JBoss AS.

To see how much would run without error, I decided to go ahead and upgrade JSFUnit to work with the new JSF 2.0 API. That required adding methods to JSFUnitFacesContext and JSFUnitExternalContext. There were some other code changes, including a change to the Environment class that detects which version of JSF is running.

Anyhow, I'm happy to report that JSFUnit now works with JSF 2.0. You can download the latest JSFUnit snapshot if you'd like to play with it. The part of the JSFUnit test suite that doesn't run is execution of the applications that use Facelets and Ajax4Jsf/RichFaces together. I've filed a bug on it, so hopefully that problem will be resolved soon. Please leave me feedback on the JSFUnit Forum if you decide to give it a try.

Lastly, I've been asked several times when JSFUnit is going to go GA. There is really nothing stopping me now except that I'd like to fix a few more bugs and maybe add support for IceFaces. Look for a release in mid-February.

So long and thanks for all the fish,

Stan