JSF 1.2 and Websphere 6.1

Long time since blogged was busy at work; so lets get down to the business.

Our systems team told us that WAS 7.0 is still a distant reality and we'll be having WAS 6.1 (whichever approved patch) for the project we are working on. In the technical stack from the architecture team, we were recommended to use JSF 1.2 and Java EE 5 both not supported by WAS 6.1. If we use JSP as view, we would have an issue in making this combo work; there was a conflict in one of the classes (I don't remember exactly even after trying to make the application first class loader). This is where Facelets would come into picture; facelets with JSF 1.2 would work fine when we set the class loader priority as application first. More reasons to use Facelets are that it’s a viewhandler purely created for JSF and it’s faster than using with JSP because of the conflicting lifecycles of JSP and JSF.

If we want to use JSF 1.2, we would require setting the class loader as application first to overide the in-built JSF implementation available with WAS 6.1. AFAIK, this would work fine when we use Facelets. If we feel we need to stick to JSF1.1 to avoid this scenario, Facelets wouldn't work with the Sun RI's implementation of JSF 1.1 but it does with the MyFaces implementation of the same and as also with Sun RI of JSF1.2.

So we need to decide on the following:

1. WAS 6.1 + MyFaces JSF 1.1 + Facelets (this might also require a class loader as application first in WAS, not sure about it).

2. WAS 6.1 + MyFaces JSF 1.2 + Facelets (this requires a class loader as application first in WAS for sure)

3. WAS 6.1 + Sun JSF 1.1 + JSP + any other AJAX control framework like Richfaces/Icefaces. (I'm not comfortable with this combination especially after reading on the benefits of using Facelets).

Most likely, we might go with option 2 probably after a blessing from the architecture team.