sampa : colin’s blog

I’m really pleased to announced that I’ve checked in the initial code into Spring Web Flow’s CVS, for seamlessly integrating with JSF.

The integration code, which was developed in collaboration with Craig McClanahan and Keith Donald, is still somewhat preliminary and needs some polish and tweaking before final release as part of Web Flow 1.0. That said, all the major pieces are there, including the use of Web Flow as the (very powerful) navigation handler for JSF apps, and transparent handling of flow and request scopes. JSF components may bind to flow scope backing objects just as easily as to any of the existing JSF scopes (request, session, app).

The fact that Web Flow has made it straightforward to implement rich and usable integrations with Spring MVC, Struts, and JSF (with more frameworks to come!) is pretty impressive. It’s a real testament to the fact that rich feature set aside, Web Flow has from the beginning been designed with the additional goal of integrating with multiple frameworks, while not compromising on the idea of a rich and viable usage model. in each environment, and prooves that there is absolutely no excuse for tying a web flow type of product to one particular lower level web UI framework vs another.

Anybody that wishes to look at or play around with the code may get at it in the Web Flow CVS. I caution people that there are still going to be a number of changes or additions in the next couple of weeks. There is currently no complete sample app, only a variation of an older version of the sellitem sample with a few pages converted. By the time of final release as part of Web Flow 1.0RC1, there should be a full sample optimized for JSF.