[Web4lib] question on jsf

[John Fereira]

Thomas Edelblute wrote:
> Earlier today, a patron came into the public library and was trying to get a bank statement off one of our Internet computers.  However, nothing was coming up, a red X appearing in place of the document.  I noticed that there was a .jsf at the end of the URL which I had never seen before.  I told the librarian I would have to do some research and get back to her as I did not know what I was looking at.
> 
> I came across this entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaServer_Faces and was about to decide that the problem was not on my end.  But Java is a funny thing to work with, and I am wondering if there is a Java update that needs to be downloaded to the client PC to make it work.
> 
> Any opinions out there?  And if I do need to download something, how do I test it to make sure it is working?

The problem that your patron saw almost certainly is not something that 
you can do about unless the site they were using was producing a page 
which required a specific browser plugin to render that portion of the 
content.  You'll see the same kind of behavior on some sites that 
require a Shockwave (or other browser plugin) when Shockwave has not 
been installed and configured into the browser of the client machine.

The jsf extension that you are seeing most likely indicates that 
JavaServer Faces is being used, however the fact that it's showing up in 
the URI (Unique Resource Identifier) does not necessarily mean that 
Faces is used on the server side,  Faces is essentially a framework for 
developing web applications using a MVC (Model View Controller) 
framework.  The jsf extension is  just part of the request URI that that 
the web server uses to identify the resources as a specific type of 
request, map that request (using a Controller) to some server side 
functionality, which probably construsts a data Model (ie. a 
representation of the bank statement), which is then passes to a View 
(most likely a JSP, Java Server Page) which produces the html for the 
response.  The big red X that shows up in the document is likely created 
at the rendering layer (the View in MVC).