Debug Web Applications

Debuggubg Web Applications is not an easy task,
However this area is involving, and there several ways now to debug Web Applications.

1. The simplest way is to use remove tags inside your html/jsp/jsf files and check the result, or adding border="1" to tags and see the layout of your html.
2. in FireFox you can use tool which is called FireBug, This is a great plugin in FireFix which allows you to debug JavaScript code, It can also show you the border of each component in the HTML, you can also see the HTTP Get and Post requrest between the Client and the Server.
3. If you develop your Web Application using Google GWT you can debug your Web Application in Develop Mode as it is a pure java application.

Flex vs. JSF

This article would compare Flex and JSF technologies and would describe the advantages and disadvantages of each technology.

JSF Advantages:

• Doesn't require plug in installation on the client side
• JSF has a standard specification and it has several implementation
• JSF has Open Source implementations which doesn't cost money.
• Changes in the JSP files are immediately shown on the browser, no need to restart the server.

JSF Disadvantages:

• Very complicate to develop because the basic implementation is pretty basic and for complicated UI screens need to have additional component libraries
• Doesn't compatible between different web browsers

Flex Advantages:

• The UI looks much nicer then JSF UI
• Flex looks like more simple to develop rather then JSF
• Compatible between different web browsers
• Flex 2 SDK and Flex Builder 2 for Education are both free

Flex Disadvantages:

• It doesn't has standard specification
• Adobe is the only provider of Flex
• It requires plug in installation on the client side , however this may not be disadvantage since Adobe claims that Flash is installed on more then 99% percent of users.
• If you build a web site which users would need to search in some search engine the search engine would not be able to understand the content of the flash files (search engines can only understand standard html files/pdf files etc')
• Flex based pages takes a lot of time to get loading compare to JSF pages
• Flex Builder 2 costs some money

Both JSF and Flex integrate very well with java.

In summary, if you build an simple enterprise application which requires nice UI I would recommend using Flex, if you build an complicated application which requires good performance or application which is open to all the Internet users I would recommend using JSF.

JSF Unit Testing

There is a new framework for sdoing JSF Unit Testing, this is part of JBoss Unit testing tools: http://labs.jboss.com/jsfunit/

Untill now it was very hard to write unit tests for JSF, This framework can increase the quality of the product by running daily unit tests on the UI screens, it seems that the framework is pretty easy to use and simple.