Yahoo! UI and JSF Update

I’ve had several people ask for an update on where things stand with my YUI components and their JSF component wrappers, so I figure I should take the time to answer that question.

In terms of the state of the components, I currently have (admittedly basic) support for three components: Calendar, Menu and TreeView. Of the three, the Calendar seems to be the most "complete" in terms of how I intend to use it, i.e., as a pop-up, one-up calendar. I’d like to add support for two-ups, as well as an always-showing form. I have not had the need to use it in such ways, so those have remained on the to do list, but they’re certainly there.

The Menu component seems to work fairly well, but it has some issues with submenus and mouseovers. If you try to mouse over to the submenu, it disappears as soon as the mouse leaves the parent menu’s area. I have not yet had a chance to track that down.

The TreeView component, which just became functional about an hour ago, is fairly basic, but, again, "working." :) On the Java side, I have defined a TreeNode class, and extended that to make TextNode, MenuNode, and HtmlNode, to match the corresponding Javascript classes. One only needs to create a TreeNode object and add any children to it, then set that on the JSF component tag via the (currently) model attribute. It’s pretty basic, but, given its age, I’ve not had a chance to press it hard and see where it needs improvement.

The big question has been, "Where can I get it?" Until recently, I didn’t have a good answer for that, but that is no longer the case. I’ve made the decision to move these components, as well as my upload and download components into the Sandbox recently opened in the source tree for the JSF reference implementation. Once the components have had a chance to bake a bit and get some more exposure and critique, they will be moved to a component library in the RI we’re tentatively calling LionFish, in keeping with the theme started with the GlassFish project. Currently, the only component available in the tree (which you can get by checking out the RI source code) is the TreeView wrapper, YuiTree. I will begin migrating the rest of the source over during the Christmas holidays.

That’s about it. If you have any other questions, feel free to email me, or, preferably, comment here. I’ll post again when all the source is available.