While ajax4jsf is a very nice Ajax framework for JSF, it’s sometimes too expensive to submit an entire form and re-render (parts of) the page just to update some data. For client-side components, like many of Dojo’s UI widgets, JSON is a simple and convenient way to represent data. It is especially useful for components that need to pull data from the server, such as a result table scrolling through thousands of rows. Instead of re-rendering the entire page, the required data is transferred via JSON and then the widget is re-rendered using JavaScript. JSON-RPC-Java provides a convenient wrapper for Java RPC (Remote Procedure Call) through JSON, i.e. both the server request and the response are encoded in JSON (instead of, say, XML).
In JSON-RPC-Java, remote procedure calls are routed through a single servlet. The server-side methods are implemented in POJOs and registered with the user session. Parameter types are determined with reflection and mapped to the corresponding JavaScript types. To get an impression of what this is about, consider this trivial (and somewhat useless) Java class implementing an uppercase service:
class MyObject {
public String toUppercase(String value) {
return value.toUpperCase(Locale.ENGLISH);
}
}
This code runs somewhere on your web server, giving you full access to any business data and methods necessary. A dynamic JavaScript proxy provided by JSON-RPC-Java allows you to call the remote procedure like a local function, e.g. to call MyObject#toUppercase(“sheep”) you would code in Javascript:
new JSONRpcClient("/jsonRpcServlet").MyObject.toUppercase("sheep")
-> "SHEEP"
In this case, the call is synchronous, i.e. the browser blocks until the response arrives. In most cases, this is not what you want for a responsive user interface. To make asynchronous calls, the first parameter to the remote procedure is a function reference. The JSON/RPC call will then proceed immediately, and the callback function will be executed when the server response arrives. For example:
function myCallback(result) { alert(result); };
new JSONRpcClient("/jsonRpcServlet").MyObject.toUppercase(myCallback, "sheep")
Compared to using ajax4jsf, this is simple and efficient. However, there are two drawbacks: First, the remote procedure call likely returns raw data, not markup ready to be passed to the client. This is not an issue with Dojo widgets since they are pure client-side JavaScript components, but it prevents you from updating parts of the rendered page without writing Ajax-aware components (which is exactly what ajax4jsf allows you to do).
Second, and not so obvious, the servlet completely circumvents the JSF environment. That means no lifecycle, no phase events, and no JSF managed beans. You gain performance but lose access to any JSF-specific data or methods on the server side. However, it is possible to share data between JSF and JSON-RPC-Java objects using the user’s HttpSession. To allow access to the HTTP request and session objects, any HttpServletRequest or HttpSession parameters to a Java method are automatically set by JSON-RPC-Java. To give another entirely useless example, this remote method would return the current user’s session ID:
class MyObject {
public String getSessionId(HttpSession session) {
return session.getId();
}
}
So far, JSON-RPC-Java has worked great for existing JavaScript components that pull their data from JSON structures, like Dojo’s FilteringTable or TreeV3 widgets. It does, however, require some effort and manual programming for communicating with the server and updating the data, and does not integrate with JSF. It depends on the use-case whether this is worth the trouble – for many common uses of Ajax (form validation, partial page rendering) this is possibly not the case, but when dealing with lots of data it might well be.
