Programming Tutorials

Installing JSF

By: Grenfel  

You will need to obtain and install a JSF implementation, and the JSP Standard Tag Library (JSTL) reference implementation. We will use the JSF reference implementation from Sun. If you have an implementation from some other vendor, consult the documentation for that implementation for installation instructions.

If you are running Tomcat 5.0 or 5.5, you can download JSF from http://java.sun.com/j2ee/javaserverfaces/download.html . If you want to install only the JSTL, you can download it from the Jakarta project website ( http://jakarta.apache.org/taglibs  ). Alternately, you can get it by downloading the JWSDP from Sun ( http://java.sun.com/webservices/jwsdp ).

There are two ways that you can make the JSF and JSTL libraries available to your web application running in Tomcat. Both require putting the following eight JAR files, which are located in the lib directory of each distribution, into a location that can be accessed by the server or the web application:

• Six JSF JARs: commons-beanutils.jar, commons-collections.jar, commons-digester.jar, commons-logging.jar, jsf-api.jar, and jsf-impl.jar
• Two JSTL JARs: jstl.jar and standard.jar

One way to make API libraries available to a web application is to place them into the WEB-INF\lib directory of the web application. Then only that application will have access to those libraries. If you have another JSF application, that application would also need access to those files in its own WEB-INF\lib directory.

Alternatively, if you have several JSF applications, you can put the JAR files into a common location. For Tomcat, that location is %TOMCAT_HOME%\common\lib. When the JAR files are located in the common directory, then every application in the application server has access to them. Note that if you copy the JAR files into the common directory while the server is running, you may need to restart the Tomcat server so the new JAR files can be loaded.

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