The good the bad and the ugly. Could be much better., 15 Jun 2008
- I don't think this book showcases JSF in a particularly good light.
- If you've used technologies like ASP.NET, you are used to IIS shielding you from the idiosyncrasies of web browser variations. It sniffs out your web browser and serves up a page that your browser will always work with. This is not the case with JSF. It's brittle. You need to have a good grasp of DHTML CSS XHTML to boot and have accumulated experiences to cope with browser variances.
- To help you achieve these goals an excellent companion to this book would be HTML Dog:The Best-Practice Guide to XHTML and CSS (Paperback) 0321311396 by Patrick Griffiths and his associated website HTMLDOG.
- I feel the authors could do with reading this to compensate for examples that don't behave well, predominantly in IE7, but sometimes with Firefox too.
- We all know Microsoft sticks two fingers up to standards and does its own thing. But in reality more users use IE7 than the better products like Firefox or Opera. So we developers have to compensate for this and cater for both in world of JSF.
- On top of this you have to cope with the complexities of the JSF lifecycle which gets pretty hairy when you start to add things like Ajax into the mix.
- The author does a sloppy job of packaging source code with all the pre-requisite jars. This happens in loads of places. Commons-logging being missing is a regular bug-bear.
- I particularly found tracking down the jars for Ajax4jsf to be a particularly painful experience, not helped by the missing jar dependencies in Maven repository and JBoss's acquisition of the project and being unable to download latest set from JBoss site. On top of the supplied ajax4jsf.jar (1.02) and oscache-2.3.2.jar, I found I needed commons-bean-utils (1.7) commons-digester 1.8 commons-logging-1.1.1, commons-collections-3.2.1.
- My gripes with the examples:
- Tiles examples. JSF and Tiles don't play ball from what I've been able to ascertain from forums. So the book should cut these examples out. Facelets is the answer. The book covers this topic in Ch10
- Shales-Validator in Ch13 won't deploy. Struts dependencies. Doesn't sound right.
- Ch13 SpinnerLib/ResourceLocatorTest example doesn't work in Glassfish.
- Seam example. Couldn't get to work in the configuration I wanted. I believe commons-el.jar was missing in this example too. The book recommends Tomcat 5.5 with JBoss embedded server to run this. Now I have Tomcat 6, Glassfish and JBoss 4.2.2.GA, and couldn't get it to play ball. The author flips to Myfaces implementation of JSF. I think JBoss 4.2.2.GA doesn't like Myfaces.
- See forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10296408?
- and jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4158195#4158195
- The basic Ajax example doesn't work in Firefox
- The custom JSF Spinner components are really lousy. Only the Javascript version approaches production ready quality, in either browser.
- The deletingRows example in Chapter 5 behaves lousily in IE7. The checkbox doesn't activate the rows, you have to click on rows themselves to get the controls to respond.
- In chapter 5 there is a database example. I initially Googled to work out how to set up a JDBC resource in Glassfish. The book actually covers this much later on, so a forward reference could have saved some time here.
- Unfortunately the references to setting up JDBC connection pools were dated.
- The Tomcat section was out of date and used Postgres. Nowadays, MySQL is shipped with Glassfish, so I'd have thought that would have been a better choice.
- See theserverside.com/discussions/thread.tss?thread_id=25459#254626 for my Tomcat 6/MySQL solution, after wading through the Tomcat 6 docs.
- A minor point is MySQL setup in Glassfish uses tabbed pages rather than a next button.
- Ch13 Popup technique 2 doesn't work in IE7.
- LDAP examples based on OpenLDAP. This is a pain to set up. You have to download source and use C compiler to get application working. Too much like hard work, if you're doing this for academic appreciation. If you need an LDAP server. Try OpenDS instead of OpenLDAP. Easier to setup.
- I also particularly disliked to smattering of API sound-bites. They really detracted from the overall flow of the book.
- Also disliked the way code snippets were referenced without being in context of class, so you don't know what you are looking at. If you are going to discuss things with code snippets, at least present the full source first. (James Holmes did the to good effect with Struts Complete Ref)
- Ch13 covers a lot of ground fast. Could have done with explaining things a little more.
- Other discrepancies:
- P534 Remove extra comma after ProcessZipCodeSelection. Wrong is source code too. Was a little devil to track down & debug. FadeAnything Ajax example in start.jsp for form-completion example of Ch11.
- P551 Accordion renderer. Refactored with helper method
- CH11 Extra spaces in one of Backing bean java source files with NO DATA/City/State
- Ant script doesn't work for some of scripts in Ch13.
Change path id="classpath" to include different fileset as follows:

< include name="**/*.jar"/ >

- (Ant still won't work for Applet. Have to fix source of Chart.java to:
for (double v : values) { to
in order to make variable v accessible.. Missing ChartPanel.class. I also packaged both classes at same time, manually compiled source & moved both classes to folder com/corejsf under web folder. Then ran ant script to package & deploy.
- On the flip side, the highlights for me were the a) The JSF-RicoAccordion example, and Shale. But the Shale example didn't work quite so well in IE7, There is an unexplained Javascript function call "nameChanged('clear')" in the onblur methods of Payee Information/name Bank Information/name. So once again some sloppy details spoils functionality. Also onblur seems to not work in IE7. Fields are supposed to return to original style as you tab out of them. HtmlDog probably has the answer for this. The layout of this example doesn't give particularly good visual cues as to when you enter the sub form. If I'd written the example, I'd at least have given the sub-form a different background colour so you realise you are in sub-form. Also I'd have begun a second row of tab markers, so you could still see where you are in the wizard process. I initially thought I'd gone back to first page of parent form!
- There are plenty of examples, which help give you good foundation in JSF.
- I've fired off countless posts on my findings through the books associated website, so hopefully when authors get a moment, they can reflect on these points to improve their product.

Learning JSF, 27 Jan 2006
Good book, clearly presented and easy to read.

Many chapters include reference pages which the author suggests you skip until the next time round. I found these pages very useful when comming up against annoying bugs in testing.

JSF implementations are very hard to debug if you don't understand the API, reading this book will get you writing code and solving problems much quicker.

Good book, 27 Jan 2006
Easy to read and understand. Some good practical tips. Lots of examples. For a developer who wants to get to grips with JSF, the config files, internationalisation, the sun reference implementation standard components, find out the basics of writing custom components.

Not really useful for someone who doesn't intend to stray beyond a GUI builder in an IDE like Java Studio Creator.

JSF is changing rapidly. But this is a good starter book for now.

The best JavaServer Faces book I have ever read, 12 Oct 2005
I recommend this book to everyone. I started reading two other books (Mastering JavaServer Faces and JavaServer Faces in Action) and this one is, definitively, the best of them. With simple examples and a simple language, it explains very well what JSF is and how it works

The good the bad and the ugly. Could be much better., 15 Jun 2008
- I don't think this book showcases JSF in a particularly good light.
- If you've used technologies like ASP.NET, you are used to IIS shielding you from the idiosyncrasies of web browser variations. It sniffs out your web browser and serves up a page that your browser will always work with. This is not the case with JSF. It's brittle. You need to have a good grasp of DHTML CSS XHTML to boot and have accumulated experiences to cope with browser variances.
- To help you achieve these goals an excellent companion to this book would be HTML Dog:The Best-Practice Guide to XHTML and CSS (Paperback) 0321311396 by Patrick Griffiths and his associated website HTMLDOG.
- I feel the authors could do with reading this to compensate for examples that don't behave well, predominantly in IE7, but sometimes with Firefox too.
- We all know Microsoft sticks two fingers up to standards and does its own thing. But in reality more users use IE7 than the better products like Firefox or Opera. So we developers have to compensate for this and cater for both in world of JSF.
- On top of this you have to cope with the complexities of the JSF lifecycle which gets pretty hairy when you start to add things like Ajax into the mix.
- The author does a sloppy job of packaging source code with all the pre-requisite jars. This happens in loads of places. Commons-logging being missing is a regular bug-bear.
- I particularly found tracking down the jars for Ajax4jsf to be a particularly painful experience, not helped by the missing jar dependencies in Maven repository and JBoss's acquisition of the project and being unable to download latest set from JBoss site. On top of the supplied ajax4jsf.jar (1.02) and oscache-2.3.2.jar, I found I needed commons-bean-utils (1.7) commons-digester 1.8 commons-logging-1.1.1, commons-collections-3.2.1.
- My gripes with the examples:
- Tiles examples. JSF and Tiles don't play ball from what I've been able to ascertain from forums. So the book should cut these examples out. Facelets is the answer. The book covers this topic in Ch10
- Shales-Validator in Ch13 won't deploy. Struts dependencies. Doesn't sound right.
- Ch13 SpinnerLib/ResourceLocatorTest example doesn't work in Glassfish.
- Seam example. Couldn't get to work in the configuration I wanted. I believe commons-el.jar was missing in this example too. The book recommends Tomcat 5.5 with JBoss embedded server to run this. Now I have Tomcat 6, Glassfish and JBoss 4.2.2.GA, and couldn't get it to play ball. The author flips to Myfaces implementation of JSF. I think JBoss 4.2.2.GA doesn't like Myfaces.
- See forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10296408?
- and jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4158195#4158195
- The basic Ajax example doesn't work in Firefox
- The custom JSF Spinner components are really lousy. Only the Javascript version approaches production ready quality, in either browser.
- The deletingRows example in Chapter 5 behaves lousily in IE7. The checkbox doesn't activate the rows, you have to click on rows themselves to get the controls to respond.
- In chapter 5 there is a database example. I initially Googled to work out how to set up a JDBC resource in Glassfish. The book actually covers this much later on, so a forward reference could have saved some time here.
- Unfortunately the references to setting up JDBC connection pools were dated.
- The Tomcat section was out of date and used Postgres. Nowadays, MySQL is shipped with Glassfish, so I'd have thought that would have been a better choice.
- See theserverside.com/discussions/thread.tss?thread_id=25459#254626 for my Tomcat 6/MySQL solution, after wading through the Tomcat 6 docs.
- A minor point is MySQL setup in Glassfish uses tabbed pages rather than a next button.
- Ch13 Popup technique 2 doesn't work in IE7.
- LDAP examples based on OpenLDAP. This is a pain to set up. You have to download source and use C compiler to get application working. Too much like hard work, if you're doing this for academic appreciation. If you need an LDAP server. Try OpenDS instead of OpenLDAP. Easier to setup.
- I also particularly disliked to smattering of API sound-bites. They really detracted from the overall flow of the book.
- Also disliked the way code snippets were referenced without being in context of class, so you don't know what you are looking at. If you are going to discuss things with code snippets, at least present the full source first. (James Holmes did the to good effect with Struts Complete Ref)
- Ch13 covers a lot of ground fast. Could have done with explaining things a little more.
- Other discrepancies:
- P534 Remove extra comma after ProcessZipCodeSelection. Wrong is source code too. Was a little devil to track down & debug. FadeAnything Ajax example in start.jsp for form-completion example of Ch11.
- P551 Accordion renderer. Refactored with helper method
- CH11 Extra spaces in one of Backing bean java source files with NO DATA/City/State
- Ant script doesn't work for some of scripts in Ch13.
Change path id="classpath" to include different fileset as follows:

< include name="**/*.jar"/ >

- (Ant still won't work for Applet. Have to fix source of Chart.java to:
for (double v : values) { to
in order to make variable v accessible.. Missing ChartPanel.class. I also packaged both classes at same time, manually compiled source & moved both classes to folder com/corejsf under web folder. Then ran ant script to package & deploy.
- On the flip side, the highlights for me were the a) The JSF-RicoAccordion example, and Shale. But the Shale example didn't work quite so well in IE7, There is an unexplained Javascript function call "nameChanged('clear')" in the onblur methods of Payee Information/name Bank Information/name. So once again some sloppy details spoils functionality. Also onblur seems to not work in IE7. Fields are supposed to return to original style as you tab out of them. HtmlDog probably has the answer for this. The layout of this example doesn't give particularly good visual cues as to when you enter the sub form. If I'd written the example, I'd at least have given the sub-form a different background colour so you realise you are in sub-form. Also I'd have begun a second row of tab markers, so you could still see where you are in the wizard process. I initially thought I'd gone back to first page of parent form!
- There are plenty of examples, which help give you good foundation in JSF.
- I've fired off countless posts on my findings through the books associated website, so hopefully when authors get a moment, they can reflect on these points to improve their product.

Learning JSF, 27 Jan 2006
Good book, clearly presented and easy to read.

Many chapters include reference pages which the author suggests you skip until the next time round. I found these pages very useful when comming up against annoying bugs in testing.

JSF implementations are very hard to debug if you don't understand the API, reading this book will get you writing code and solving problems much quicker.

Good book, 27 Jan 2006
Easy to read and understand. Some good practical tips. Lots of examples. For a developer who wants to get to grips with JSF, the config files, internationalisation, the sun reference implementation standard components, find out the basics of writing custom components.

Not really useful for someone who doesn't intend to stray beyond a GUI builder in an IDE like Java Studio Creator.

JSF is changing rapidly. But this is a good starter book for now.

The best JavaServer Faces book I have ever read, 12 Oct 2005
I recommend this book to everyone. I started reading two other books (Mastering JavaServer Faces and JavaServer Faces in Action) and this one is, definitively, the best of them. With simple examples and a simple language, it explains very well what JSF is and how it works

A good introduction to JSF, 19 Mar 2005
This book provides a good introduction to the JavaServer Faces technology. However some topics should be discussed more in detail, such as the link between the JSF code and the backing beans. Some more considerations on how to organize a JSF application at architectural level in non-trivial contexts would significantly increase the added value of this book.
There is a significant lack of bibliographical references.

Everything you need to get you going with JSF, 19 Aug 2004
As being new to Java Server Faces technology I found this book Extremely helpful. It answered most of my questions and included a lot of practical examples which comes handy especially if you need to use JSF compononts programmatically or tweak a bit with the JSF internals.
The book describes JSF in a clear and simple manner with a good 'hands on' attitude. It is suitable for absolute newbies and will get you coding your first JSF application as quickly as possible.

The good the bad and the ugly. Could be much better., 15 Jun 2008
- I don't think this book showcases JSF in a particularly good light.
- If you've used technologies like ASP.NET, you are used to IIS shielding you from the idiosyncrasies of web browser variations. It sniffs out your web browser and serves up a page that your browser will always work with. This is not the case with JSF. It's brittle. You need to have a good grasp of DHTML CSS XHTML to boot and have accumulated experiences to cope with browser variances.
- To help you achieve these goals an excellent companion to this book would be HTML Dog:The Best-Practice Guide to XHTML and CSS (Paperback) 0321311396 by Patrick Griffiths and his associated website HTMLDOG.
- I feel the authors could do with reading this to compensate for examples that don't behave well, predominantly in IE7, but sometimes with Firefox too.
- We all know Microsoft sticks two fingers up to standards and does its own thing. But in reality more users use IE7 than the better products like Firefox or Opera. So we developers have to compensate for this and cater for both in world of JSF.
- On top of this you have to cope with the complexities of the JSF lifecycle which gets pretty hairy when you start to add things like Ajax into the mix.
- The author does a sloppy job of packaging source code with all the pre-requisite jars. This happens in loads of places. Commons-logging being missing is a regular bug-bear.
- I particularly found tracking down the jars for Ajax4jsf to be a particularly painful experience, not helped by the missing jar dependencies in Maven repository and JBoss's acquisition of the project and being unable to download latest set from JBoss site. On top of the supplied ajax4jsf.jar (1.02) and oscache-2.3.2.jar, I found I needed commons-bean-utils (1.7) commons-digester 1.8 commons-logging-1.1.1, commons-collections-3.2.1.
- My gripes with the examples:
- Tiles examples. JSF and Tiles don't play ball from what I've been able to ascertain from forums. So the book should cut these examples out. Facelets is the answer. The book covers this topic in Ch10
- Shales-Validator in Ch13 won't deploy. Struts dependencies. Doesn't sound right.
- Ch13 SpinnerLib/ResourceLocatorTest example doesn't work in Glassfish.
- Seam example. Couldn't get to work in the configuration I wanted. I believe commons-el.jar was missing in this example too. The book recommends Tomcat 5.5 with JBoss embedded server to run this. Now I have Tomcat 6, Glassfish and JBoss 4.2.2.GA, and couldn't get it to play ball. The author flips to Myfaces implementation of JSF. I think JBoss 4.2.2.GA doesn't like Myfaces.
- See forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10296408?
- and jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4158195#4158195
- The basic Ajax example doesn't work in Firefox
- The custom JSF Spinner components are really lousy. Only the Javascript version approaches production ready quality, in either browser.
- The deletingRows example in Chapter 5 behaves lousily in IE7. The checkbox doesn't activate the rows, you have to click on rows themselves to get the controls to respond.
- In chapter 5 there is a database example. I initially Googled to work out how to set up a JDBC resource in Glassfish. The book actually covers this much later on, so a forward reference could have saved some time here.
- Unfortunately the references to setting up JDBC connection pools were dated.
- The Tomcat section was out of date and used Postgres. Nowadays, MySQL is shipped with Glassfish, so I'd have thought that would have been a better choice.
- See theserverside.com/discussions/thread.tss?thread_id=25459#254626 for my Tomcat 6/MySQL solution, after wading through the Tomcat 6 docs.
- A minor point is MySQL setup in Glassfish uses tabbed pages rather than a next button.
- Ch13 Popup technique 2 doesn't work in IE7.
- LDAP examples based on OpenLDAP. This is a pain to set up. You have to download source and use C compiler to get application working. Too much like hard work, if you're doing this for academic appreciation. If you need an LDAP server. Try OpenDS instead of OpenLDAP. Easier to setup.
- I also particularly disliked to smattering of API sound-bites. They really detracted from the overall flow of the book.
- Also disliked the way code snippets were referenced without being in context of class, so you don't know what you are looking at. If you are going to discuss things with code snippets, at least present the full source first. (James Holmes did the to good effect with Struts Complete Ref)
- Ch13 covers a lot of ground fast. Could have done with explaining things a little more.
- Other discrepancies:
- P534 Remove extra comma after ProcessZipCodeSelection. Wrong is source code too. Was a little devil to track down & debug. FadeAnything Ajax example in start.jsp for form-completion example of Ch11.
- P551 Accordion renderer. Refactored with helper method
- CH11 Extra spaces in one of Backing bean java source files with NO DATA/City/State
- Ant script doesn't work for some of scripts in Ch13.
Change path id="classpath" to include different fileset as follows:

< include name="**/*.jar"/ >

- (Ant still won't work for Applet. Have to fix source of Chart.java to:
for (double v : values) { to
in order to make variable v accessible.. Missing ChartPanel.class. I also packaged both classes at same time, manually compiled source & moved both classes to folder com/corejsf under web folder. Then ran ant script to package & deploy.
- On the flip side, the highlights for me were the a) The JSF-RicoAccordion example, and Shale. But the Shale example didn't work quite so well in IE7, There is an unexplained Javascript function call "nameChanged('clear')" in the onblur methods of Payee Information/name Bank Information/name. So once again some sloppy details spoils functionality. Also onblur seems to not work in IE7. Fields are supposed to return to original style as you tab out of them. HtmlDog probably has the answer for this. The layout of this example doesn't give particularly good visual cues as to when you enter the sub form. If I'd written the example, I'd at least have given the sub-form a different background colour so you realise you are in sub-form. Also I'd have begun a second row of tab markers, so you could still see where you are in the wizard process. I initially thought I'd gone back to first page of parent form!
- There are plenty of examples, which help give you good foundation in JSF.
- I've fired off countless posts on my findings through the books associated website, so hopefully when authors get a moment, they can reflect on these points to improve their product.

Learning JSF, 27 Jan 2006
Good book, clearly presented and easy to read.

Many chapters include reference pages which the author suggests you skip until the next time round. I found these pages very useful when comming up against annoying bugs in testing.

JSF implementations are very hard to debug if you don't understand the API, reading this book will get you writing code and solving problems much quicker.

Good book, 27 Jan 2006
Easy to read and understand. Some good practical tips. Lots of examples. For a developer who wants to get to grips with JSF, the config files, internationalisation, the sun reference implementation standard components, find out the basics of writing custom components.

Not really useful for someone who doesn't intend to stray beyond a GUI builder in an IDE like Java Studio Creator.

JSF is changing rapidly. But this is a good starter book for now.

The best JavaServer Faces book I have ever read, 12 Oct 2005
I recommend this book to everyone. I started reading two other books (Mastering JavaServer Faces and JavaServer Faces in Action) and this one is, definitively, the best of them. With simple examples and a simple language, it explains very well what JSF is and how it works

A good introduction to JSF, 19 Mar 2005
This book provides a good introduction to the JavaServer Faces technology. However some topics should be discussed more in detail, such as the link between the JSF code and the backing beans. Some more considerations on how to organize a JSF application at architectural level in non-trivial contexts would significantly increase the added value of this book.
There is a significant lack of bibliographical references.

Everything you need to get you going with JSF, 19 Aug 2004
As being new to Java Server Faces technology I found this book Extremely helpful. It answered most of my questions and included a lot of practical examples which comes handy especially if you need to use JSF compononts programmatically or tweak a bit with the JSF internals.
The book describes JSF in a clear and simple manner with a good 'hands on' attitude. It is suitable for absolute newbies and will get you coding your first JSF application as quickly as possible.

An Excellent book, 18 Jan 2007
This book is very good, and covers the subject matter pretty well. Although I have used JSP and JAVA for the last few years. I always keep certain books that I believe will serve me well. And Yep this is one those books that will serve me well for years to come so it will stay on my bookshelf.

The good the bad and the ugly. Could be much better., 15 Jun 2008
- I don't think this book showcases JSF in a particularly good light.
- If you've used technologies like ASP.NET, you are used to IIS shielding you from the idiosyncrasies of web browser variations. It sniffs out your web browser and serves up a page that your browser will always work with. This is not the case with JSF. It's brittle. You need to have a good grasp of DHTML CSS XHTML to boot and have accumulated experiences to cope with browser variances.
- To help you achieve these goals an excellent companion to this book would be HTML Dog:The Best-Practice Guide to XHTML and CSS (Paperback) 0321311396 by Patrick Griffiths and his associated website HTMLDOG.
- I feel the authors could do with reading this to compensate for examples that don't behave well, predominantly in IE7, but sometimes with Firefox too.
- We all know Microsoft sticks two fingers up to standards and does its own thing. But in reality more users use IE7 than the better products like Firefox or Opera. So we developers have to compensate for this and cater for both in world of JSF.
- On top of this you have to cope with the complexities of the JSF lifecycle which gets pretty hairy when you start to add things like Ajax into the mix.
- The author does a sloppy job of packaging source code with all the pre-requisite jars. This happens in loads of places. Commons-logging being missing is a regular bug-bear.
- I particularly found tracking down the jars for Ajax4jsf to be a particularly painful experience, not helped by the missing jar dependencies in Maven repository and JBoss's acquisition of the project and being unable to download latest set from JBoss site. On top of the supplied ajax4jsf.jar (1.02) and oscache-2.3.2.jar, I found I needed commons-bean-utils (1.7) commons-digester 1.8 commons-logging-1.1.1, commons-collections-3.2.1.
- My gripes with the examples:
- Tiles examples. JSF and Tiles don't play ball from what I've been able to ascertain from forums. So the book should cut these examples out. Facelets is the answer. The book covers this topic in Ch10
- Shales-Validator in Ch13 won't deploy. Struts dependencies. Doesn't sound right.
- Ch13 SpinnerLib/ResourceLocatorTest example doesn't work in Glassfish.
- Seam example. Couldn't get to work in the configuration I wanted. I believe commons-el.jar was missing in this example too. The book recommends Tomcat 5.5 with JBoss embedded server to run this. Now I have Tomcat 6, Glassfish and JBoss 4.2.2.GA, and couldn't get it to play ball. The author flips to Myfaces implementation of JSF. I think JBoss 4.2.2.GA doesn't like Myfaces.
- See forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10296408?
- and jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4158195#4158195
- The basic Ajax example doesn't work in Firefox
- The custom JSF Spinner components are really lousy. Only the Javascript version approaches production ready quality, in either browser.
- The deletingRows example in Chapter 5 behaves lousily in IE7. The checkbox doesn't activate the rows, you have to click on rows themselves to get the controls to respond.
- In chapter 5 there is a database example. I initially Googled to work out how to set up a JDBC resource in Glassfish. The book actually covers this much later on, so a forward reference could have saved some time here.
- Unfortunately the references to setting up JDBC connection pools were dated.
- The Tomcat section was out of date and used Postgres. Nowadays, MySQL is shipped with Glassfish, so I'd have thought that would have been a better choice.
- See theserverside.com/discussions/thread.tss?thread_id=25459#254626 for my Tomcat 6/MySQL solution, after wading through the Tomcat 6 docs.
- A minor point is MySQL setup in Glassfish uses tabbed pages rather than a next button.
- Ch13 Popup technique 2 doesn't work in IE7.
- LDAP examples based on OpenLDAP. This is a pain to set up. You have to download source and use C compiler to get application working. Too much like hard work, if you're doing this for academic appreciation. If you need an LDAP server. Try OpenDS instead of OpenLDAP. Easier to setup.
- I also particularly disliked to smattering of API sound-bites. They really detracted from the overall flow of the book.
- Also disliked the way code snippets were referenced without being in context of class, so you don't know what you are looking at. If you are going to discuss things with code snippets, at least present the full source first. (James Holmes did the to good effect with Struts Complete Ref)
- Ch13 covers a lot of ground fast. Could have done with explaining things a little more.
- Other discrepancies:
- P534 Remove extra comma after ProcessZipCodeSelection. Wrong is source code too. Was a little devil to track down & debug. FadeAnything Ajax example in start.jsp for form-completion example of Ch11.
- P551 Accordion renderer. Refactored with helper method
- CH11 Extra spaces in one of Backing bean java source files with NO DATA/City/State
- Ant script doesn't work for some of scripts in Ch13.
Change path id="classpath" to include different fileset as follows:

< include name="**/*.jar"/ >

- (Ant still won't work for Applet. Have to fix source of Chart.java to:
for (double v : values) { to
in order to make variable v accessible.. Missing ChartPanel.class. I also packaged both classes at same time, manually compiled source & moved both classes to folder com/corejsf under web folder. Then ran ant script to package & deploy.
- On the flip side, the highlights for me were the a) The JSF-RicoAccordion example, and Shale. But the Shale example didn't work quite so well in IE7, There is an unexplained Javascript function call "nameChanged('clear')" in the onblur methods of Payee Information/name Bank Information/name. So once again some sloppy details spoils functionality. Also onblur seems to not work in IE7. Fields are supposed to return to original style as you tab out of them. HtmlDog probably has the answer for this. The layout of this example doesn't give particularly good visual cues as to when you enter the sub form. If I'd written the example, I'd at least have given the sub-form a different background colour so you realise you are in sub-form. Also I'd have begun a second row of tab markers, so you could still see where you are in the wizard process. I initially thought I'd gone back to first page of parent form!
- There are plenty of examples, which help give you good foundation in JSF.
- I've fired off countless posts on my findings through the books associated website, so hopefully when authors get a moment, they can reflect on these points to improve their product.

Learning JSF, 27 Jan 2006
Good book, clearly presented and easy to read.

Many chapters include reference pages which the author suggests you skip until the next time round. I found these pages very useful when comming up against annoying bugs in testing.

JSF implementations are very hard to debug if you don't understand the API, reading this book will get you writing code and solving problems much quicker.

Good book, 27 Jan 2006
Easy to read and understand. Some good practical tips. Lots of examples. For a developer who wants to get to grips with JSF, the config files, internationalisation, the sun reference implementation standard components, find out the basics of writing custom components.

Not really useful for someone who doesn't intend to stray beyond a GUI builder in an IDE like Java Studio Creator.

JSF is changing rapidly. But this is a good starter book for now.

The best JavaServer Faces book I have ever read, 12 Oct 2005
I recommend this book to everyone. I started reading two other books (Mastering JavaServer Faces and JavaServer Faces in Action) and this one is, definitively, the best of them. With simple examples and a simple language, it explains very well what JSF is and how it works

A good introduction to JSF, 19 Mar 2005
This book provides a good introduction to the JavaServer Faces technology. However some topics should be discussed more in detail, such as the link between the JSF code and the backing beans. Some more considerations on how to organize a JSF application at architectural level in non-trivial contexts would significantly increase the added value of this book.
There is a significant lack of bibliographical references.

Everything you need to get you going with JSF, 19 Aug 2004
As being new to Java Server Faces technology I found this book Extremely helpful. It answered most of my questions and included a lot of practical examples which comes handy especially if you need to use JSF compononts programmatically or tweak a bit with the JSF internals.
The book describes JSF in a clear and simple manner with a good 'hands on' attitude. It is suitable for absolute newbies and will get you coding your first JSF application as quickly as possible.

An Excellent book, 18 Jan 2007
This book is very good, and covers the subject matter pretty well. Although I have used JSP and JAVA for the last few years. I always keep certain books that I believe will serve me well. And Yep this is one those books that will serve me well for years to come so it will stay on my bookshelf.

Excellent examples - too bad they don't work, 08 Mar 2008
The book is example based, which is good if you want to have something useful up and running fast. I specifically enjoyed the Virtual Trainer example, which is approximately the same program as the Sun Certified Java Developer Exam - just on the web instead of Swing. When you have coded the example you feel prepared to do anything in JSF. The book contains tons of other examples which are all extremely useful.

On the downside I have to mention that most of the examples don't work! Some of the examples cannot even compile! The theory behind the examples are poorly explained - if explained at all. It is possible to download the examples from the Internet - Luckily most, but not all, of these downloadable example does work. Putting it all together I find that I have used more time debugging than actually learning JSF.

The good the bad and the ugly. Could be much better., 15 Jun 2008
- I don't think this book showcases JSF in a particularly good light.
- If you've used technologies like ASP.NET, you are used to IIS shielding you from the idiosyncrasies of web browser variations. It sniffs out your web browser and serves up a page that your browser will always work with. This is not the case with JSF. It's brittle. You need to have a good grasp of DHTML CSS XHTML to boot and have accumulated experiences to cope with browser variances.
- To help you achieve these goals an excellent companion to this book would be HTML Dog:The Best-Practice Guide to XHTML and CSS (Paperback) 0321311396 by Patrick Griffiths and his associated website HTMLDOG.
- I feel the authors could do with reading this to compensate for examples that don't behave well, predominantly in IE7, but sometimes with Firefox too.
- We all know Microsoft sticks two fingers up to standards and does its own thing. But in reality more users use IE7 than the better products like Firefox or Opera. So we developers have to compensate for this and cater for both in world of JSF.
- On top of this you have to cope with the complexities of the JSF lifecycle which gets pretty hairy when you start to add things like Ajax into the mix.
- The author does a sloppy job of packaging source code with all the pre-requisite jars. This happens in loads of places. Commons-logging being missing is a regular bug-bear.
- I particularly found tracking down the jars for Ajax4jsf to be a particularly painful experience, not helped by the missing jar dependencies in Maven repository and JBoss's acquisition of the project and being unable to download latest set from JBoss site. On top of the supplied ajax4jsf.jar (1.02) and oscache-2.3.2.jar, I found I needed commons-bean-utils (1.7) commons-digester 1.8 commons-logging-1.1.1, commons-collections-3.2.1.
- My gripes with the examples:
- Tiles examples. JSF and Tiles don't play ball from what I've been able to ascertain from forums. So the book should cut these examples out. Facelets is the answer. The book covers this topic in Ch10
- Shales-Validator in Ch13 won't deploy. Struts dependencies. Doesn't sound right.
- Ch13 SpinnerLib/ResourceLocatorTest example doesn't work in Glassfish.
- Seam example. Couldn't get to work in the configuration I wanted. I believe commons-el.jar was missing in this example too. The book recommends Tomcat 5.5 with JBoss embedded server to run this. Now I have Tomcat 6, Glassfish and JBoss 4.2.2.GA, and couldn't get it to play ball. The author flips to Myfaces implementation of JSF. I think JBoss 4.2.2.GA doesn't like Myfaces.
- See forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10296408?
- and jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4158195#4158195
- The basic Ajax example doesn't work in Firefox
- The custom JSF Spinner components are really lousy. Only the Javascript version approaches production ready quality, in either browser.
- The deletingRows example in Chapter 5 behaves lousily in IE7. The checkbox doesn't activate the rows, you have to click on rows themselves to get the controls to respond.
- In chapter 5 there is a database example. I initially Googled to work out how to set up a JDBC resource in Glassfish. The book actually covers this much later on, so a forward reference could have saved some time here.
- Unfortunately the references to setting up JDBC connection pools were dated.
- The Tomcat section was out of date and used Postgres. Nowadays, MySQL is shipped with Glassfish, so I'd have thought that would have been a better choice.
- See theserverside.com/discussions/thread.tss?thread_id=25459#254626 for my Tomcat 6/MySQL solution, after wading through the Tomcat 6 docs.
- A minor point is MySQL setup in Glassfish uses tabbed pages rather than a next button.
- Ch13 Popup technique 2 doesn't work in IE7.
- LDAP examples based on OpenLDAP. This is a pain to set up. You have to download source and use C compiler to get application working. Too much like hard work, if you're doing this for academic appreciation. If you need an LDAP server. Try OpenDS instead of OpenLDAP. Easier to setup.
- I also particularly disliked to smattering of API sound-bites. They really detracted from the overall flow of the book.
- Also disliked the way code snippets were referenced without being in context of class, so you don't know what you are looking at. If you are going to discuss things with code snippets, at least present the full source first. (James Holmes did the to good effect with Struts Complete Ref)
- Ch13 covers a lot of ground fast. Could have done with explaining things a little more.
- Other discrepancies:
- P534 Remove extra comma after ProcessZipCodeSelection. Wrong is source code too. Was a little devil to track down & debug. FadeAnything Ajax example in start.jsp for form-completion example of Ch11.
- P551 Accordion renderer. Refactored with helper method
- CH11 Extra spaces in one of Backing bean java source files with NO DATA/City/State
- Ant script doesn't work for some of scripts in Ch13.
Change path id="classpath" to include different fileset as follows:

< include name="**/*.jar"/ >

- (Ant still won't work for Applet. Have to fix source of Chart.java to:
for (double v : values) { to
in order to make variable v accessible.. Missing ChartPanel.class. I also packaged both classes at same time, manually compiled source & moved both classes to folder com/corejsf under web folder. Then ran ant script to package & deploy.
- On the flip side, the highlights for me were the a) The JSF-RicoAccordion example, and Shale. But the Shale example didn't work quite so well in IE7, There is an unexplained Javascript function call "nameChanged('clear')" in the onblur methods of Payee Information/name Bank Information/name. So once again some sloppy details spoils functionality. Also onblur seems to not work in IE7. Fields are supposed to return to original style as you tab out of them. HtmlDog probably has the answer for this. The layout of this example doesn't give particularly good visual cues as to when you enter the sub form. If I'd written the example, I'd at least have given the sub-form a different background colour so you realise you are in sub-form. Also I'd have begun a second row of tab markers, so you could still see where you are in the wizard process. I initially thought I'd gone back to first page of parent form!
- There are plenty of examples, which help give you good foundation in JSF.
- I've fired off countless posts on my findings through the books associated website, so hopefully when authors get a moment, they can reflect on these points to improve their product.

Learning JSF, 27 Jan 2006
Good book, clearly presented and easy to read.

Many chapters include reference pages which the author suggests you skip until the next time round. I found these pages very useful when comming up against annoying bugs in testing.

JSF implementations are very hard to debug if you don't understand the API, reading this book will get you writing code and solving problems much quicker.

Good book, 27 Jan 2006
Easy to read and understand. Some good practical tips. Lots of examples. For a developer who wants to get to grips with JSF, the config files, internationalisation, the sun reference implementation standard components, find out the basics of writing custom components.

Not really useful for someone who doesn't intend to stray beyond a GUI builder in an IDE like Java Studio Creator.

JSF is changing rapidly. But this is a good starter book for now.

The best JavaServer Faces book I have ever read, 12 Oct 2005
I recommend this book to everyone. I started reading two other books (Mastering JavaServer Faces and JavaServer Faces in Action) and this one is, definitively, the best of them. With simple examples and a simple language, it explains very well what JSF is and how it works

A good introduction to JSF, 19 Mar 2005
This book provides a good introduction to the JavaServer Faces technology. However some topics should be discussed more in detail, such as the link between the JSF code and the backing beans. Some more considerations on how to organize a JSF application at architectural level in non-trivial contexts would significantly increase the added value of this book.
There is a significant lack of bibliographical references.

Everything you need to get you going with JSF, 19 Aug 2004
As being new to Java Server Faces technology I found this book Extremely helpful. It answered most of my questions and included a lot of practical examples which comes handy especially if you need to use JSF compononts programmatically or tweak a bit with the JSF internals.
The book describes JSF in a clear and simple manner with a good 'hands on' attitude. It is suitable for absolute newbies and will get you coding your first JSF application as quickly as possible.

An Excellent book, 18 Jan 2007
This book is very good, and covers the subject matter pretty well. Although I have used JSP and JAVA for the last few years. I always keep certain books that I believe will serve me well. And Yep this is one those books that will serve me well for years to come so it will stay on my bookshelf.

Excellent examples - too bad they don't work, 08 Mar 2008
The book is example based, which is good if you want to have something useful up and running fast. I specifically enjoyed the Virtual Trainer example, which is approximately the same program as the Sun Certified Java Developer Exam - just on the web instead of Swing. When you have coded the example you feel prepared to do anything in JSF. The book contains tons of other examples which are all extremely useful.

On the downside I have to mention that most of the examples don't work! Some of the examples cannot even compile! The theory behind the examples are poorly explained - if explained at all. It is possible to download the examples from the Internet - Luckily most, but not all, of these downloadable example does work. Putting it all together I find that I have used more time debugging than actually learning JSF.

This book has little to do with GlassFish, 06 Mar 2008
The subtitle of this book ("The complete guide to installing and configuring GlassFish...") is at best ambiguous and at worst outright misleading. One has to read the synopsis in detail to find out what this book really covers. This book is NOT about configuring GlassFish in any level of detail.

I bought this book to get up to speed on GlassFish, and to be quite honest the only thing it was good for was how to download it and perform the initial installation, and this I could have easily gotten from Sun's website as well.

This book mostly covers EE5 technologies (and that not in great detail either), with the occasional mention of how they fit-in with GlassFish. If you want to learn about EE5...get a different book...if you want to learn about GlassFish...get your infos from the web.

One thing that really annoyed me were the over-dimensioned (and sometimes repeated!) screenshots; not to mention the frequent irrelevant code snippets (e.g. half a page of catch() statements that add nothing to the example). In places the english was bad, and the layout is terrible (have the people at Packt Publishing never read a Manning or O'Reilly book to see what a good layout for a technical book looks like?).

In short, I cannot see any reason why anybody would buy this book, and I definitely think I didn't get value-for-money here.

Disappointing, 21 Nov 2007
I purchased this on the basis of the promise made on its front cover: "The complete guide to installing and configuring GlassFish". Firstly, this is as far from "complete" as I have ever come across.

As you no doubt know, GlassFish V2 is a highly sophisticated JEE app server. I have been using it for over a year but the impact and/or appropriateness of many of its "deeper" configuration settings were unknown to me. I hoped this book would answer my questions.

For instance, there are about 100 parameter settings for connection pools (which manage connections to a database). Excluding the screen shots of the web-based GUI, connection pools are covered in about twenty lines of text. Most of which are lines introducing the pictures. In fact, apart from the glib statement about accepting the defaults, there is nothing about how to choose the parameters governing connection pools. Or even how they work. A quick check in the Index reveals no mention of connection pools! There's no mention of JNDI in the index either!

OK so what about domain configuration files? Nothing. Templates? Nope.

So what does it cover? Well, it's a farily slim volume anyway but it covers the suite of web-tier and data-tier environments (Servlets, JSP, EJBs, even JDBC, and security) but in an incredibly shallow way. This might suite an out and out novice, but if you're a seasoned web programmer this book will not deliver!

This book is for novices at best. It is in no way a "complete guide to GlassFish". One to be avoided.

The good the bad and the ugly. Could be much better., 15 Jun 2008
- I don't think this book showcases JSF in a particularly good light.
- If you've used technologies like ASP.NET, you are used to IIS shielding you from the idiosyncrasies of web browser variations. It sniffs out your web browser and serves up a page that your browser will always work with. This is not the case with JSF. It's brittle. You need to have a good grasp of DHTML CSS XHTML to boot and have accumulated experiences to cope with browser variances.
- To help you achieve these goals an excellent companion to this book would be HTML Dog:The Best-Practice Guide to XHTML and CSS (Paperback) 0321311396 by Patrick Griffiths and his associated website HTMLDOG.
- I feel the authors could do with reading this to compensate for examples that don't behave well, predominantly in IE7, but sometimes with Firefox too.
- We all know Microsoft sticks two fingers up to standards and does its own thing. But in reality more users use IE7 than the better products like Firefox or Opera. So we developers have to compensate for this and cater for both in world of JSF.
- On top of this you have to cope with the complexities of the JSF lifecycle which gets pretty hairy when you start to add things like Ajax into the mix.
- The author does a sloppy job of packaging source code with all the pre-requisite jars. This happens in loads of places. Commons-logging being missing is a regular bug-bear.
- I particularly found tracking down the jars for Ajax4jsf to be a particularly painful experience, not helped by the missing jar dependencies in Maven repository and JBoss's acquisition of the project and being unable to download latest set from JBoss site. On top of the supplied ajax4jsf.jar (1.02) and oscache-2.3.2.jar, I found I needed commons-bean-utils (1.7) commons-digester 1.8 commons-logging-1.1.1, commons-collections-3.2.1.
- My gripes with the examples:
- Tiles examples. JSF and Tiles don't play ball from what I've been able to ascertain from forums. So the book should cut these examples out. Facelets is the answer. The book covers this topic in Ch10
- Shales-Validator in Ch13 won't deploy. Struts dependencies. Doesn't sound right.
- Ch13 SpinnerLib/ResourceLocatorTest example doesn't work in Glassfish.
- Seam example. Couldn't get to work in the configuration I wanted. I believe commons-el.jar was missing in this example too. The book recommends Tomcat 5.5 with JBoss embedded server to run this. Now I have Tomcat 6, Glassfish and JBoss 4.2.2.GA, and couldn't get it to play ball. The author flips to Myfaces implementation of JSF. I think JBoss 4.2.2.GA doesn't like Myfaces.
- See forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10296408?
- and jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4158195#4158195
- The basic Ajax example doesn't work in Firefox
- The custom JSF Spinner components are really lousy. Only the Javascript version approaches production ready quality, in either browser.
- The deletingRows example in Chapter 5 behaves lousily in IE7. The checkbox doesn't activate the rows, you have to click on rows themselves to get the controls to respond.
- In chapter 5 there is a database example. I initially Googled to work out how to set up a JDBC resource in Glassfish. The book actually covers this much later on, so a forward reference could have saved some time here.
- Unfortunately the references to setting up JDBC connection pools were dated.
- The Tomcat section was out of date and used Postgres. Nowadays, MySQL is shipped with Glassfish, so I'd have thought that would have been a better choice.
- See theserverside.com/discussions/thread.tss?thread_id=25459#254626 for my Tomcat 6/MySQL solution, after wading through the Tomcat 6 docs.
- A minor point is MySQL setup in Glassfish uses tabbed pages rather than a next button.
- Ch13 Popup technique 2 doesn't work in IE7.
- LDAP examples based on OpenLDAP. This is a pain to set up. You have to download source and use C compiler to get application working. Too much like hard work, if you're doing this for academic appreciation. If you need an LDAP server. Try OpenDS instead of OpenLDAP. Easier to setup.
- I also particularly disliked to smattering of API sound-bites. They really detracted from the overall flow of the book.
- Also disliked the way code snippets were referenced without being in context of class, so you don't know what you are looking at. If you are going to discuss things with code snippets, at least present the full source first. (James Holmes did the to good effect with Struts Complete Ref)
- Ch13 covers a lot of ground fast. Could have done with explaining things a little more.
- Other discrepancies:
- P534 Remove extra comma after ProcessZipCodeSelection. Wrong is source code too. Was a little devil to track down & debug. FadeAnything Ajax example in start.jsp for form-completion example of Ch11.
- P551 Accordion renderer. Refactored with helper method
- CH11 Extra spaces in one of Backing bean java source files with NO DATA/City/State
- Ant script doesn't work for some of scripts in Ch13.
Change path id="classpath" to include different fileset as follows:

< include name="**/*.jar"/ >

- (Ant still won't work for Applet. Have to fix source of Chart.java to:
for (double v : values) { to
in order to make variable v accessible.. Missing ChartPanel.class. I also packaged both classes at same time, manually compiled source & moved both classes to folder com/corejsf under web folder. Then ran ant script to package & deploy.
- On the flip side, the highlights for me were the a) The JSF-RicoAccordion example, and Shale. But the Shale example didn't work quite so well in IE7, There is an unexplained Javascript function call "nameChanged('clear')" in the onblur methods of Payee Information/name Bank Information/name. So once again some sloppy details spoils functionality. Also onblur seems to not work in IE7. Fields are supposed to return to original style as you tab out of them. HtmlDog probably has the answer for this. The layout of this example doesn't give particularly good visual cues as to when you enter the sub form. If I'd written the example, I'd at least have given the sub-form a different background colour so you realise you are in sub-form. Also I'd have begun a second row of tab markers, so you could still see where you are in the wizard process. I initially thought I'd gone back to first page of parent form!
- There are plenty of examples, which help give you good foundation in JSF.
- I've fired off countless posts on my findings through the books associated website, so hopefully when authors get a moment, they can reflect on these points to improve their product.

Learning JSF, 27 Jan 2006
Good book, clearly presented and easy to read.

Many chapters include reference pages which the author suggests you skip until the next time round. I found these pages very useful when comming up against annoying bugs in testing.

JSF implementations are very hard to debug if you don't understand the API, reading this book will get you writing code and solving problems much quicker.

Good book, 27 Jan 2006
Easy to read and understand. Some good practical tips. Lots of examples. For a developer who wants to get to grips with JSF, the config files, internationalisation, the sun reference implementation standard components, find out the basics of writing custom components.

Not really useful for someone who doesn't intend to stray beyond a GUI builder in an IDE like Java Studio Creator.

JSF is changing rapidly. But this is a good starter book for now.

The best JavaServer Faces book I have ever read, 12 Oct 2005
I recommend this book to everyone. I started reading two other books (Mastering JavaServer Faces and JavaServer Faces in Action) and this one is, definitively, the best of them. With simple examples and a simple language, it explains very well what JSF is and how it works

A good introduction to JSF, 19 Mar 2005
This book provides a good introduction to the JavaServer Faces technology. However some topics should be discussed more in detail, such as the link between the JSF code and the backing beans. Some more considerations on how to organize a JSF application at architectural level in non-trivial contexts would significantly increase the added value of this book.
There is a significant lack of bibliographical references.

Everything you need to get you going with JSF, 19 Aug 2004
As being new to Java Server Faces technology I found this book Extremely helpful. It answered most of my questions and included a lot of practical examples which comes handy especially if you need to use JSF compononts programmatically or tweak a bit with the JSF internals.
The book describes JSF in a clear and simple manner with a good 'hands on' attitude. It is suitable for absolute newbies and will get you coding your first JSF application as quickly as possible.

An Excellent book, 18 Jan 2007
This book is very good, and covers the subject matter pretty well. Although I have used JSP and JAVA for the last few years. I always keep certain books that I believe will serve me well. And Yep this is one those books that will serve me well for years to come so it will stay on my bookshelf.

Excellent examples - too bad they don't work, 08 Mar 2008
The book is example based, which is good if you want to have something useful up and running fast. I specifically enjoyed the Virtual Trainer example, which is approximately the same program as the Sun Certified Java Developer Exam - just on the web instead of Swing. When you have coded the example you feel prepared to do anything in JSF. The book contains tons of other examples which are all extremely useful.

On the downside I have to mention that most of the examples don't work! Some of the examples cannot even compile! The theory behind the examples are poorly explained - if explained at all. It is possible to download the examples from the Internet - Luckily most, but not all, of these downloadable example does work. Putting it all together I find that I have used more time debugging than actually learning JSF.

This book has little to do with GlassFish, 06 Mar 2008
The subtitle of this book ("The complete guide to installing and configuring GlassFish...") is at best ambiguous and at worst outright misleading. One has to read the synopsis in detail to find out what this book really covers. This book is NOT about configuring GlassFish in any level of detail.

I bought this book to get up to speed on GlassFish, and to be quite honest the only thing it was good for was how to download it and perform the initial installation, and this I could have easily gotten from Sun's website as well.

This book mostly covers EE5 technologies (and that not in great detail either), with the occasional mention of how they fit-in with GlassFish. If you want to learn about EE5...get a different book...if you want to learn about GlassFish...get your infos from the web.

One thing that really annoyed me were the over-dimensioned (and sometimes repeated!) screenshots; not to mention the frequent irrelevant code snippets (e.g. half a page of catch() statements that add nothing to the example). In places the english was bad, and the layout is terrible (have the people at Packt Publishing never read a Manning or O'Reilly book to see what a good layout for a technical book looks like?).

In short, I cannot see any reason why anybody would buy this book, and I definitely think I didn't get value-for-money here.

Disappointing, 21 Nov 2007
I purchased this on the basis of the promise made on its front cover: "The complete guide to installing and configuring GlassFish". Firstly, this is as far from "complete" as I have ever come across.

As you no doubt know, GlassFish V2 is a highly sophisticated JEE app server. I have been using it for over a year but the impact and/or appropriateness of many of its "deeper" configuration settings were unknown to me. I hoped this book would answer my questions.

For instance, there are about 100 parameter settings for connection pools (which manage connections to a database). Excluding the screen shots of the web-based GUI, connection pools are covered in about twenty lines of text. Most of which are lines introducing the pictures. In fact, apart from the glib statement about accepting the defaults, there is nothing about how to choose the parameters governing connection pools. Or even how they work. A quick check in the Index reveals no mention of connection pools! There's no mention of JNDI in the index either!

OK so what about domain configuration files? Nothing. Templates? Nope.

So what does it cover? Well, it's a farily slim volume anyway but it covers the suite of web-tier and data-tier environments (Servlets, JSP, EJBs, even JDBC, and security) but in an incredibly shallow way. This might suite an out and out novice, but if you're a seasoned web programmer this book will not deliver!

This book is for novices at best. It is in no way a "complete guide to GlassFish". One to be avoided.

Weak examples, 25 Nov 2003
Knowing Java I wanted a quick introduction to JSP.
This book does give a quick introduction and is good at helping you get a working development environment (with Tomcat). However I now have more questions than answers. There is not enough of the WHY we are doing this. Many aspects of JSP are covered, inc. JDBC, but it is all too quick and doesn't explain or give enough examples to make points clear. Many examples rely on java beans that the author does not give code for and thus understanding of what is going on underneath is lost.
Not enough depth for serious programming.
I'm buying another book for JSP!

A truly excellent introduction to JSP, 22 Oct 2003
As with most of Mike McGrath's titles, 'JSP in easy steps' is a really useful, no nonsense introduction to a powerful programming language. Unlike many other authors McGrath is not prone to being verbose and this helps to add simplicity and clarity to his work.

When I first started programming some time ago I began using the Wrox ‘Beginning’ series. Although these titles do have their merits, often McGrath seems to be able to say in a couple of pages what Wrox authors say in 30+. I feel that this is a far more useful approach as it makes the process of learning far more enjoyable and easy. The student is then given the freedom to mess about on their own and try things out, something which I believe is essential in learning how to program.

The guide to installing Tomcat, MySQL, JDBC etc (all of which are completely free to the user) was easy to follow, and the examples illustrating the uses to which JSP can be put in conjunction with databases were very impressive.

Of course there are a thousand and one things the book does not cover for those who want to become real professional JSP programmers, but as an introduction I find it hard to imagine a more useful book.

A real bargain, highly recommended!

JSP, 22 Feb 2003
If you're interested in learning JSP then this book will be suitable. It has good explinations of the JSP coding in a excellent layout. Includes loads of sample code to base any projects upon.

The good the bad and the ugly. Could be much better., 15 Jun 2008
- I don't think this book showcases JSF in a particularly good light.
- If you've used technologies like ASP.NET, you are used to IIS shielding you from the idiosyncrasies of web browser variations. It sniffs out your web browser and serves up a page that your browser will always work with. This is not the case with JSF. It's brittle. You need to have a good grasp of DHTML CSS XHTML to boot and have accumulated experiences to cope with browser variances.
- To help you achieve these goals an excellent companion to this book would be HTML Dog:The Best-Practice Guide to XHTML and CSS (Paperback) 0321311396 by Patrick Griffiths and his associated website HTMLDOG.
- I feel the authors could do with reading this to compensate for examples that don't behave well, predominantly in IE7, but sometimes with Firefox too.
- We all know Microsoft sticks two fingers up to standards and does its own thing. But in reality more users use IE7 than the better products like Firefox or Opera. So we developers have to compensate for this and cater for both in world of JSF.
- On top of this you have to cope with the complexities of the JSF lifecycle which gets pretty hairy when you start to add things like Ajax into the mix.
- The author does a sloppy job of packaging source code with all the pre-requisite jars. This happens in loads of places. Commons-logging being missing is a regular bug-bear.
- I particularly found tracking down the jars for Ajax4jsf to be a particularly painful experience, not helped by the missing jar dependencies in Maven repository and JBoss's acquisition of the project and being unable to download latest set from JBoss site. On top of the supplied ajax4jsf.jar (1.02) and oscache-2.3.2.jar, I found I needed commons-bean-utils (1.7) commons-digester 1.8 commons-logging-1.1.1, commons-collections-3.2.1.
- My gripes with the examples:
- Tiles examples. JSF and Tiles don't play ball from what I've been able to ascertain from forums. So the book should cut these examples out. Facelets is the answer. The book covers this topic in Ch10
- Shales-Validator in Ch13 won't deploy. Struts dependencies. Doesn't sound right.
- Ch13 SpinnerLib/ResourceLocatorTest example doesn't work in Glassfish.
- Seam example. Couldn't get to work in the configuration I wanted. I believe commons-el.jar was missing in this example too. The book recommends Tomcat 5.5 with JBoss embedded server to run this. Now I have Tomcat 6, Glassfish and JBoss 4.2.2.GA, and couldn't get it to play ball. The author flips to Myfaces implementation of JSF. I think JBoss 4.2.2.GA doesn't like Myfaces.
- See forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10296408?
- and jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4158195#4158195
- The basic Ajax example doesn't work in Firefox
- The custom JSF Spinner components are really lousy. Only the Javascript version approaches production ready quality, in either browser.
- The deletingRows example in Chapter 5 behaves lousily in IE7. The checkbox doesn't activate the rows, you have to click on rows themselves to get the controls to respond.
- In chapter 5 there is a database example. I initially Googled to work out how to set up a JDBC resource in Glassfish. The book actually covers this much later on, so a forward reference could have saved some time here.
- Unfortunately the references to setting up JDBC connection pools were dated.
- The Tomcat section was out of date and used Postgres. Nowadays, MySQL is shipped with Glassfish, so I'd have thought that would have been a better choice.
- See theserverside.com/discussions/thread.tss?thread_id=25459#254626 for my Tomcat 6/MySQL solution, after wading through the Tomcat 6 docs.
- A minor point is MySQL setup in Glassfish uses tabbed pages rather than a next button.
- Ch13 Popup technique 2 doesn't work in IE7.
- LDAP examples based on OpenLDAP. This is a pain to set up. You have to download source and use C compiler to get application working. Too much like hard work, if you're doing this for academic appreciation. If you need an LDAP server. Try OpenDS instead of OpenLDAP. Easier to setup.
- I also particularly disliked to smattering of API sound-bites. They really detracted from the overall flow of the book.
- Also disliked the way code snippets were referenced without being in context of class, so you don't know what you are looking at. If you are going to discuss things with code snippets, at least present the full source first. (James Holmes did the to good effect with Struts Complete Ref)
- Ch13 covers a lot of ground fast. Could have done with explaining things a little more.
- Other discrepancies:
- P534 Remove extra comma after ProcessZipCodeSelection. Wrong is source code too. Was a little devil to track down & debug. FadeAnything Ajax example in start.jsp for form-completion example of Ch11.
- P551 Accordion renderer. Refactored with helper method
- CH11 Extra spaces in one of Backing bean java source files with NO DATA/City/State
- Ant script doesn't work for some of scripts in Ch13.
Change path id="classpath" to include different fileset as follows:

< include name="**/*.jar"/ >

- (Ant still won't work for Applet. Have to fix source of Chart.java to:
for (double v : values) { to
in order to make variable v accessible.. Missing ChartPanel.class. I also packaged both classes at same time, manually compiled source & moved both classes to folder com/corejsf under web folder. Then ran ant script to package & deploy.
- On the flip side, the highlights for me were the a) The JSF-RicoAccordion example, and Shale. But the Shale example didn't work quite so well in IE7, There is an unexplained Javascript function call "nameChanged('clear')" in the onblur methods of Payee Information/name Bank Information/name. So once again some sloppy details spoils functionality. Also onblur seems to not work in IE7. Fields are supposed to return to original style as you tab out of them. HtmlDog probably has the answer for this. The layout of this example doesn't give particularly good visual cues as to when you enter the sub form. If I'd written the example, I'd at least have given the sub-form a different background colour so you realise you are in sub-form. Also I'd have begun a second row of tab markers, so you could still see where you are in the wizard process. I initially thought I'd gone back to first page of parent form!
- There are plenty of examples, which help give you good foundation in JSF.
- I've fired off countless posts on my findings through the books associated website, so hopefully when authors get a moment, they can reflect on these points to improve their product.

Learning JSF, 27 Jan 2006
Good book, clearly presented and easy to read.

Many chapters include reference pages which the author suggests you skip until the next time round. I found these pages very useful when comming up against annoying bugs in testing.

JSF implementations are very hard to debug if you don't understand the API, reading this book will get you writing code and solving problems much quicker.

Good book, 27 Jan 2006
Easy to read and understand. Some good practical tips. Lots of examples. For a developer who wants to get to grips with JSF, the config files, internationalisation, the sun reference implementation standard components, find out the basics of writing custom components.

Not really useful for someone who doesn't intend to stray beyond a GUI builder in an IDE like Java Studio Creator.

JSF is changing rapidly. But this is a good starter book for now.

The best JavaServer Faces book I have ever read, 12 Oct 2005
I recommend this book to everyone. I started reading two other books (Mastering JavaServer Faces and JavaServer Faces in Action) and this one is, definitively, the best of them. With simple examples and a simple language, it explains very well what JSF is and how it works

A good introduction to JSF, 19 Mar 2005
This book provides a good introduction to the JavaServer Faces technology. However some topics should be discussed more in detail, such as the link between the JSF code and the backing beans. Some more considerations on how to organize a JSF application at architectural level in non-trivial contexts would significantly increase the added value of this book.
There is a significant lack of bibliographical references.

Everything you need to get you going with JSF, 19 Aug 2004
As being new to Java Server Faces technology I found this book Extremely helpful. It answered most of my questions and included a lot of practical examples which comes handy especially if you need to use JSF compononts programmatically or tweak a bit with the JSF internals.
The book describes JSF in a clear and simple manner with a good 'hands on' attitude. It is suitable for absolute newbies and will get you coding your first JSF application as quickly as possible.

An Excellent book, 18 Jan 2007
This book is very good, and covers the subject matter pretty well. Although I have used JSP and JAVA for the last few years. I always keep certain books that I believe will serve me well. And Yep this is one those books that will serve me well for years to come so it will stay on my bookshelf.

Excellent examples - too bad they don't work, 08 Mar 2008
The book is example based, which is good if you want to have something useful up and running fast. I specifically enjoyed the Virtual Trainer example, which is approximately the same program as the Sun Certified Java Developer Exam - just on the web instead of Swing. When you have coded the example you feel prepared to do anything in JSF. The book contains tons of other examples which are all extremely useful.

On the downside I have to mention that most of the examples don't work! Some of the examples cannot even compile! The theory behind the examples are poorly explained - if explained at all. It is possible to download the examples from the Internet - Luckily most, but not all, of these downloadable example does work. Putting it all together I find that I have used more time debugging than actually learning JSF.

This book has little to do with GlassFish, 06 Mar 2008
The subtitle of this book ("The complete guide to installing and configuring GlassFish...") is at best ambiguous and at worst outright misleading. One has to read the synopsis in detail to find out what this book really covers. This book is NOT about configuring GlassFish in any level of detail.

I bought this book to get up to speed on GlassFish, and to be quite honest the only thing it was good for was how to download it and perform the initial installation, and this I could have easily gotten from Sun's website as well.

This book mostly covers EE5 technologies (and that not in great detail either), with the occasional mention of how they fit-in with GlassFish. If you want to learn about EE5...get a different book...if you want to learn about GlassFish...get your infos from the web.

One thing that really annoyed me were the over-dimensioned (and sometimes repeated!) screenshots; not to mention the frequent irrelevant code snippets (e.g. half a page of catch() statements that add nothing to the example). In places the english was bad, and the layout is terrible (have the people at Packt Publishing never read a Manning or O'Reilly book to see what a good layout for a technical book looks like?).

In short, I cannot see any reason why anybody would buy this book, and I definitely think I didn't get value-for-money here.

Disappointing, 21 Nov 2007
I purchased this on the basis of the promise made on its front cover: "The complete guide to installing and configuring GlassFish". Firstly, this is as far from "complete" as I have ever come across.

As you no doubt know, GlassFish V2 is a highly sophisticated JEE app server. I have been using it for over a year but the impact and/or appropriateness of many of its "deeper" configuration settings were unknown to me. I hoped this book would answer my questions.

For instance, there are about 100 parameter settings for connection pools (which manage connections to a database). Excluding the screen shots of the web-based GUI, connection pools are covered in about twenty lines of text. Most of which are lines introducing the pictures. In fact, apart from the glib statement about accepting the defaults, there is nothing about how to choose the parameters governing connection pools. Or even how they work. A quick check in the Index reveals no mention of connection pools! There's no mention of JNDI in the index either!

OK so what about domain configuration files? Nothing. Templates? Nope.

So what does it cover? Well, it's a farily slim volume anyway but it covers the suite of web-tier and data-tier environments (Servlets, JSP, EJBs, even JDBC, and security) but in an incredibly shallow way. This might suite an out and out novice, but if you're a seasoned web programmer this book will not deliver!

This book is for novices at best. It is in no way a "complete guide to GlassFish". One to be avoided.

Weak examples, 25 Nov 2003
Knowing Java I wanted a quick introduction to JSP.
This book does give a quick introduction and is good at helping you get a working development environment (with Tomcat). However I now have more questions than answers. There is not enough of the WHY we are doing this. Many aspects of JSP are covered, inc. JDBC, but it is all too quick and doesn't explain or give enough examples to make points clear. Many examples rely on java beans that the author does not give code for and thus understanding of what is going on underneath is lost.
Not enough depth for serious programming.
I'm buying another book for JSP!

A truly excellent introduction to JSP, 22 Oct 2003
As with most of Mike McGrath's titles, 'JSP in easy steps' is a really useful, no nonsense introduction to a powerful programming language. Unlike many other authors McGrath is not prone to being verbose and this helps to add simplicity and clarity to his work.

When I first started programming some time ago I began using the Wrox ‘Beginning’ series. Although these titles do have their merits, often McGrath seems to be able to say in a couple of pages what Wrox authors say in 30+. I feel that this is a far more useful approach as it makes the process of learning far more enjoyable and easy. The student is then given the freedom to mess about on their own and try things out, something which I believe is essential in learning how to program.

The guide to installing Tomcat, MySQL, JDBC etc (all of which are completely free to the user) was easy to follow, and the examples illustrating the uses to which JSP can be put in conjunction with databases were very impressive.

Of course there are a thousand and one things the book does not cover for those who want to become real professional JSP programmers, but as an introduction I find it hard to imagine a more useful book.

A real bargain, highly recommended!

JSP, 22 Feb 2003
If you're interested in learning JSP then this book will be suitable. It has good explinations of the JSP coding in a excellent layout. Includes loads of sample code to base any projects upon.

OK for money, 07 Jan 2005
I didnt expect much for the money, and I didnt get it.

At just over 80 pages its the thinnest pocket guide I have bought to date.

Some of its very basic, how to add comments, opening and closing tags, if you cant remember this then this book wont save you!

It does go on to cover more useful stuff, like bean directives which I seem to forget now and then. Just about worth the money, not sure how much practical use it will be.