First-time form submission fails

Question

In the crossbar-hello application at
http://www.crossbar.info/crossbar/
the first time you visit the page and submit the form, the same page comes right back, unchanged, with its default form values. If you try again, it works fine, for all subsequent attempts.
If you quit your browser and try again, the same errant behaviour is observed.
The application is very similar to EA4 jsf-guessNumber, which doesn't show this problem.
I've tried several browsers and several tweaks to the app without identifying the source of the problem.
Any hints where to look?
I'll post the code here, if it would be helpful. Or you can download the source at http://www.crossbar.info/.

Answer 1

This is because the RI only keeps one component tree around, and throws away the one it has when it receives a request for a new one.
When you include a stylesheet with a URL that starts with "/faces", the request for the stylesheet gets processed by JSF. JSF believes it's a "real" request, so it throws away the component tree it just created for the JSF page that contains the stylesheet reference. On the next request, it has to build the tree from scratch again and doesn't process the request data. If the browser caches the stylesheet, you only see this on the first postback.
The solution is to use an absolute path for the stylesheet and place it somewhere else than under "/faces" in the URL structure, e.g.,
  <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
    href="${pageContext.request.contextPath}/style.css">if you use a JSP 2.0 container and have the stylesheet in the top web application directory.