How to structure a JSF application (EAR/WAR/JAR)

Question

Hi All,
How do you recommend I should structure a JSF application in terms of EARs, WARs and JARs?
Let me set the context for you: I have a fairly large project which consists of a number of sub components. Each of these sub components are JSF applications in the sense that they have JSF pages connected to each other. So, for instance, I have a company management sub component and a product management subcomponent. Most of these sub components share some Java libraries and/or entities.
Because of this I decided to have each sub component contained in its own WAR, with no universal libraries in its lib folder, and to then add these WARs to an EAR with all the library JARs in the EAR's lib folder, as so:
EAR
   |_ component1.WAR
   |_ component2.WAR
   |_ lib
         |_ sharedlib1.JAR
         |_ sharedlib2.JARUnfortunately I'm having more problems than I hoped I would with JSF with this setup. An alternative I have is to create one gigantic WAR which contains all the library archives and then to only deploy this WAR. Although this would probably work, it destroys the nice seperation I had between sub components, where I could for instance just remove the one WAR from the EAR if it was giving problems. That structure would look something like this:
WAR
   |_ <WebContent>
   |_ WEB-INF
             |_ classes
                       |_ <JSF classes>
             |_ lib
                    |_ sharedlib1.JAR
                    |_ sharedlib2.JARFinally, I have a third option where I add all the libraries required by a WAR to its lib folder and I have no shared libraries in the EAR's lib folder. The disadvantages are of course that the EAR will be huge as JARs get duplicated unnecessarily, and I'm not sure that this won't cause conflicts. The structure would look like this:
EAR
   |_ component1.WAR
                    |_ WEB-INF
                              |_ lib
                                    |_ sharedlib1.JAR
                                    |_ sharedlib2.JAR
   |_ component2.WAR
                    |_ WEB-INF
                              |_ lib
                                    |_ sharedlib1.JAR
                                    |_ sharedlib2.JARI believe the first way to be the best, but I'm struggling getting JSF to work like I expect (see [http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=5288069|http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=5288069] ). What are your suggestions?
Thank you,
Ristretto

Answer 1

Dear hiwa,
thank you very much for your response. I have had a look into the book and found out that it provides indeed half of the solution i need. Now I can generate a JSF response to my non-JSF request which has been issued by the main application.
Unfortunately this is only the first half of the solution, because the JSF framework of the child application will still render URIs into HTML-forms (e.g. for the <f:view>) that point to the faces servlet and not to the non-JSF servlet of the main application.
I'll try to solve this problem by providing my own ViewHandler that provides other URIs. But I still don't know how to encode the view ID into the generated HTML-form as a hidden field.
After all, I am really surprised at how difficult it is to integrate the JSF framework into a non-JSF application. I don't think this is a very uncommon scenario. In my case, we integrate into an existing large application of our customer in order to extend his application with our product. I would expect this to work out of the box with JSF (sigh).
I will post my progress in this matter if I found some interesting solution.
Bye, Marcus