Weblets FAQ

What is this thing

Please refer to either the short documentation section or the long documentation section for a thorough explanation.

Why Weblets

Well there are different frameworks for resource loading. Shale Remoting, Spring Resource loading, JSF 2.0 resource loading.

It really depends on your needs of what you want to use

Shale Remoting supports JSF only since Shale is a pure JSF extension framework. Spring Resource Loading does not cover the client side aspects, it is code only JSF 2.0 simply is not here yet, and will also be jsf only

If you feel that one of those frameworks suits your needs, feel free to use it.

However, Weblets is here and works universally!

Does Weblets have localized resources

JSF 2.0 has specified localized resources, Weblets does not have them yet, however, having localized resources is a highly interesting, feature and definitely will be part of a future Weblets version.

Is weblets suitable for high load sites

As of Weblets 1.0 I would not recommend to serve all resources from weblets in high load sites although java has become quite fast and Weblets supports mechanisms to reduce the server load it depends on the configuration.

If you have a working HTTP Server serves the static resources, app server serves the dynamic ones then you will not gain anything speedwise from using Weblets, on the contrary, you might lose performance or increase loads because Weblets serves the resources from your local classpath!

With later versions this mechanism might be expanded, if you want to use Weblets now use the weblets frontend API and never direct url calls, that way you stay on the save side and will get external urls once a redirection mechanism is in place!

Can Weblets be used for serving application state specific resources

Example, a web application has two customers, both of them should get different resources depending on the customer.

There are several ways to do that, a) You simply could use the el or dynamic string generation to switch dynamically between differente weblets

#weblet.url[dynamicbean.customerweblet]['/path/to/resource']

The other option would be to use an api extension point.

Weblets for instance has a managed bean which serves as the source of the url and resource functions. It does nothing fancy. It just defines two methods and returns jsf dummy maps

The class for the bean can be found under net.java.dev.weblets.impl.faces.FacesElWebletImpl You could instead of using the weblet bean define your own beans class which adds the customer information and alters the weblet name on the fly!

In other frameworks like jsp based ones you could write your own decorating tools class and use that one as weblet serving bean!

Weblets does not work

Check your log for error messages or warning messages, check your web.xml for path patterns which have to be set. If you are in a jsf environment and you seem to have any settings correct, yet it still fails to start, switch to the Weblets Servlet!

Also if you cannot find the cause of your problem, consult the mailing lists the developers lurk in the Weblets mailinglist, happy to answer every question.

I use JDK 1.3 and a rather old container I tried to integrate Weblets in a legacy site!

Sorry, you are out of luck, Weblets currently supports Servlet 2.4 and JDK4+.

I have an improvement or bugfix

Please send in patches over the bugtracker or mailing lists, every donation is welcome. Weblets is a non profit community project and thus is a two way street, you will get a lot but also every helping hand no matter how small the help is, is welcome! Even documentation error reports and/or fixes are welcome!

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