Do you know any such framework?

[Abid Rafique]

Hello Everybody,
well, i m not new to coderanch but had to re-register as i forgot my old user id and password.

i m developing a web application using JSF, hibernate, websphere etc.

on JSF, i want to show a shared calendar which will contain some events in each cell.
each event should be clickable <h:commandLink> and i should get its value in the backing bean.

do you know of any such framework which can ease my life?
or do you have any idea which approach would require minimum coding with maximum productivity?

thank you so much to all of you!

Abzee

[Tim Holloway]

Welcome to the JavaRanch, Abzie!

Several of the JSF extension tagsets support this kind of thing. One of them is the RichFaces calendar control. Check out http://livedemo.exadel.com/richfaces-demo/richfaces/calendar.jsf?tab=organizer&cid=1512998 .

Note that the calendar cells are basically just table grid cells, so putting command links and stuff like that is trivial.

[Abid Rafique]

Thank you so much,
exactly what i wanted.

but i m using IBM JSF implementation and i cant use Rich Faces due to company policy.
is there any way that i can build a custom component just same as this component?

Abzee

[Tim Holloway]

What is your "real name"? We can can probably fix things for you, which would be a better way of handling your lost identity problem. Besides, unless you can demonstrate that "antipro" is a legitimate surname, the Name Police will catch up with you.

I am reminded of a very large and famous insurance company which kept their mainframe tape catalog on index cards because they were so rabidly pro-IBM that they would rather without a software-based tape catalogue than buy one of the industry-standard non-IBM catalog products that everyone else in town used.

Although if you're running WebSphere 6.1, it can be a right royal pain to use with RichFaces and any current version of JSF.

RichFaces is part of the JBoss family of software products. JBoss is a division of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), a Forune 500 company with a market valuation of over 1 billion dollars and still growing. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a major partner of IBM in the Linux field. I run DB2 under RHEL 5 in production for one of my clients. Disclaimer: I'm also a RHT shareholder. Only Cisco has produced comparable returns on my initial investment, and I no longer hold Cisco, because unlike RHT, Cisco has stagnated.

But, if you work for an "index card" company, none of that will matter, because RHT is not IBM. There's just no helping some people.

Yes, you can create your own calendar control from scratch, just like the RichFaces authors did. It will be non-standard, won't have 5+ years of debugging effort behind it, probably won't have as big a support team behind it, and very likely won't be well-documented. In short, it will be horribly expensive to create and maintain something that simply replicates the function of standard products already invented elsewhere.

You also should expect to spend 2 months or so getting it working, especially if you're not well-experienced with the internals of JSF1 or JSF2 (whichever version you're using). And, did I mention that stuff that depends on JSF internals is more likely to break when new software releases come out?

Whatever you do, don't buy into the "All You Have To Do Is..." assertion. Neither users nor programmers are good at allowing for the extra "have to do" that comes because computers are not intuitive like humans and have to have even the finest details explained and the smallest loopholes closed.

While you're at it, it's not a bad idea to update the CV. Just in case.

[Abid Rafique]

Thanks Tim for such a great reply.

You are partially right about my company, most of the products we use belong to IBM (almost 80% i would say).

The version i m using is Websphere 7 and JSF 1.2.

Even I dont like being pro-IBM or Pro-Oracle.

I love open source products rather.
Ubuntu, Eclipse, Android, Java, Firefox and the list is too long to pen down here.

I just dont want to share my real name because of some privacy issues.
else I m quite comfortable sharing it offline.

Any ways, Tim!
I sincerely want to appreciate your efforts and support you provide to we developers around the world.

Lifes difficult without such support,

Abzie!

[Tim Holloway]

There's nothing inherently wrong with being pro-IBM or pro-Oracle. It's when it becomes an excuse for lazy thinking that it becomes a vice. When, in fact, it becomes counter-productive. It's one thing to be conservative, but when you ignore major products simply because some other Fortune company than IBM produces them - from an IBM partner, no less - then you (the decision maker) are a liability to your organization.

Personally, the main reason I prefer open-source is that these days, getting timely and useful support on expensive proprietary software products is difficult.

In fact, I have a very simple and basic question posted out to one well-known and popular financial product's "support forum" that has gone unanswered for 3 weeks now. This is what we pay for? By golly, we never promised 15-minute response on the JavaRanch (where we don't get paid for providing support), but it's a rare case where you can't get a usable answer - or at least a useless answer in 2-3 days.

You can send me a private message with your name in it so that we can keep it confidential.