Writing a versatile input/output component for JSF, I realized two things:
- Composition works great. It is almost trivial to delegate encoding and decoding to existing components like the JSF core input tags via composition. Facelets templates offer this functionality in a declarative way without coding (or compiling), and I wouldn’t want to use JSF without them at all, but it’s nice that composition is rather easy in core JSF anyway.
- You don’t want to pull SelectMany values from ExternalContext#getRequestParameterMap(), but use ExternalContext#getRequestParameterValuesMap() instead.
- Doing a “render-time” iterator component similar to Facelets’ ui:repeat is insanely hard to do right. Really. Rendering the child components multiple times with different data is easy, but to let them perform correctly on every stage of the lifecycle is near to impossible without some intimate knowledge of JSF. I’d really like to read a book on these kinds of advanced JSF topics (and not on designing another calendar component), but I’ve yet to find one.
