Skip to main content

Servlet 3.0 – Add frameworks as Plugins

With Servlet 3.0, it is now possible to include external or 3rd party frameworks as plug-ins to the web application. This is made possible by the ServletContainerInitializer interface. The documentation says that the implementation of this interface - “allows a library/runtime to be notified of a web application's startup phase and perform any required programmatic registration of servlets, filters, and listeners in response to it”. The servlet container finds the ServletContainerInitializer using the JAR services API during application startup. The framework implementing the ServletContainerInitializer needs to add a file named javax.servlet.ServletContainerInitializer in the META-INF/services directory of the JAR file. This file points to the implementation class of the ServletContainerInitializer.The JSF 2 Majorra implementation has used this feature. If we check the JSF-IMPL-2.x jar this file is located in META-INF/services folder and points to the class -  com.sun.faces.config.FacesInitializer. If we look into this class we will find the following lines -

	ServletRegistration reg = servletContext.addServlet("FacesServlet","javax.faces.webapp.FacesServlet");
reg.addMapping("/faces/*", "*.jsf", "*.faces");
servletContext.setAttribute(RIConstants.FACES_INITIALIZER_MAPPINGS_ADDED, Boolean.TRUE);

The ServletContainerInitializer thus registers the faces servlet and three URL mappings out of the box leading to clean web.xml. In fact web.xml is optional in Servlet 3.0.


A note on JBOSS 6 JSF application

JBOSS 6, JSF deployer is very special. It does some tricks with a JSF 2 web application. You can read it here - http://docs.jboss.org/jbossas/6/JSF_Guide/en-US/html/jsf.deployer.config.html

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Breaking down the CRM monolith

In my previous posts, I have shared some theory regarding microservices. But it's time to start some implementation. I love to write code and see and feel things working. So I will start a series to refactor a monolithic CRM system and transform it into microservices based flexible software. Big ball of mud. Customer Relationship Management(CRM) is that giant software which existed since time immemorial and is used by all companies in some form or shape. Big enterprises will buy CRM software (also known as packages) from top CRM vendors like Oracle, SAP, Salesforce etc and then employ an army of consultants to try and implement it. Most of the classic CRM systems in the market today, even if deployed on the cloud are the big monolithic ball of mud. They are the gigantic piece of software with the huge feature set. Most often those requirements are surplus to the requirement or they will not fit into the processes of the company. So the company has to hire these certified consu...

Part 3 - Integrating Tiles, Thymeleaf and Spring MVC 3

In this post I will demonstrate how to integrate Apache Tiles with Thymeleaf. This is very simple. The first step is to include the tiles and thymeleaf-tiles extension dependencies. I will include them in the pom.xml. Note we wil lbe using Tiles 2.2.2 Listing 1 - parent/pom.xml --- thymeleaf-tiles and tiles dependencies <!-- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ --> <!-- Tiles --> <!-- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ --> <dependency> <groupId>org.apache.tiles</groupId> <artifactId>tiles-core</artifactId> <version>${tiles.version}</version> <scope>compile</scope> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>org.apache.tiles</groupId> <artifactId>tiles-template</artifactId> <version>${tiles.version}</version> <scope>compile</s...

CKEDITOR 3.x - Simplest Ajax Submit Plugin

  I have assumed that you have downloaded and got started with CKEDITOR. Step 1 – The html file is shown below: <html> <head> <title>Writer</title> <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="content-type" /> <script type="text/javascript" src="ckeditor/ckeditor.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery-1.4.2.min.js"></script> <style> .cke_contents { height: 400px !important; } </style> </head> <body> <form action="sample_posteddata.php" method="post"> <textarea id="editor" > </textarea> <script type="text/javascript"> //<![CDATA[ CKEDITOR.replace( 'editor', { fullPage : true, uiColor : '#9AB8F3', toolbar : 'MyToolbar' }); //]]> </script> </form> </body> </html> Note that the jquery js...