ICEfaces 2.0.0 Alpha 3 Release Notes

May 31st, 2010

About This Release

ICEfaces v2.0 Alpha 3 is an early developer milestone for the next-generation of ICEfaces, designed for JSF 2.0.

Notable Changes and Improvements

New "Window" Scope. This custom scope is designed to fill in a gap in the existing scopes available for JSF 2.0,
as it exists for the life of a browser window or tab including surviving reloads and refreshes. There is more information
in the Compatibility under [Scopes].
New Push Architecture. The ICEfaces Ajax Push feature has been completely re-implemented using a all-new architecture for
improved performance and robustness.
New Client APIs. New JavaScript APIs have been added for monitoring interesting events that occur on the client.
More details are available in the JavaScript Client API documentation.
ICEfaces 1.8.2 Component Suite Support. This release provides virtually complete support for an ICEfaces 2.0-compatible version
of the ICEfaces 1.8.2 Component Suite. See the Known Issues and [Compatibility] sections for more information.
New Documentation. Documentation for ICEfaces 2.0 is now exclusively available online in this ICEfaces Wiki.
Maven2 Support. The download bundles include Maven2 .pom files for the ICEfaces libraries and associated ant configuration
files to support readily importing the ICEfaces 2.0 Alpha2 libraries into a local Maven2 repository.
The maven resources in the bundle have been determined to be incorrect. Corrected Maven2 resources can now be found in the following SVN repository:
http://anonsvn.icefaces.org/repo/maven2/snapshots/
JSF2 RI. The included JSF 2 RI "Mojarra" version has been updated to v 2.0.2.
General Bug Fixes. Lots of bugs squashed since Alpha 1.

For a complete list of all changes in this release, see the related JIRA Change Log.

Known Issues

The following section describes the most commonly encountered known issues with this release:

General

JSPs are not supported by ICEfaces 2.0, use Facelets instead.
Due to a bug in the Sun Mojarra JSF 2 runtime library, navigation between ICEfaces and non-ICEfaces pages is not working in this release.
It is anticipated that the upcoming Mojarra JSF v2.0.3 release will correct this issue.
See ICE-5157 for details.
In some cases an NullPointerException may be logged against the org.icefaces.application.WindowScopeManager.
This runtime error can be safely ignored.

1.8.x Compatibility

The ice:inputFile component in the ICEfaces 1.8.2 Component Suite is not functional in this release.
The following ICEfaces 1.8.2 Component Suite components are deprecated for ICEfaces 2.0 and are not functional.
JSF 2.0 provides suitable replacements for these that should be used instead.
- ice:outputDeclaration (use Facelets standard approach instead)
- ice:outputBody (use h:body instead)
- ice:outputHead (use h:head instead)
- ice:outputHtml (use <HTML> tag instead)
The "ice:form" component must be used (in place of "h:form") when using the "ice" components via the ICEfaces 1.8 Compatibility components. See ICE-5090 for details.
Due to a bug in the Sun Mojarra JSF 2 runtime library, component binding does not work when used within a View scope with the partial submit feature provided by the ICEfaces 1.8 compatibility library. See ICE-5226 for details.

ICEpush

ICEpush is limited to a single push application per server in this release. Viewing multiple ICEfaces push applications in the same browser from the same host server concurrently will result in only one of the applications having functional push capabilities.
Applications using the PushRender (or SessionRenderer in the compatibility library) may experience sporadic
premature time-outs of related push groups, causing the push-updates to stop functioning. A page reload will
correct the problem. See ICE-227 for details.

Application Servers

Glassfish 3

When interacting with an ICEfaces 2 application on Glassfish 3, the warning below may be logged,
with no impact on the application functionality:

WARNING: PWC4011: Unable to set request character encoding to UTF-8 from context /basic,
 because request parameters have already been read, or ServletRequest.getReader() has already been called.

See JIRA-5209 for details.

Tomcat 6.0
- Including icepush.jar causes exception when redeploying application on Tomcat6.0 on WinXP. See ICE-5222 for a configuration work-around.

Support

Open source community support is available at http://www.icefaces.org.

All questions, comments, or general discussions specific to ICEfaces 2.0 Alpha should be made in the ICEfaces Development Build Feedback forum.

ICEfaces-2.0.0-Alpha3 Release Notes