We were developing a Chinese language localization for an application at work. And I here’s a few things that might help if you’re doing something similar.
Step 1. Download a Unicode Font
First, you need to a Unicode-capable font. Normally you would have Arial Unicode MS.
Adobe, in it’s arguably self-serving pursuit to make Flex more popular offered an online training module called Flex In A Week. Admittedly, it’s quite good. I’ve been using it but watching it online just doesn’t work for me since I don’t have continuous Internet access.
I tried their suggestion for watching the videos online. Unfortunately, it means installing Adobe Media Player (which is yet another sucky media player) and adding the RSS feed http://sessions.adobe.com/FlexInAWeek/feed.xml to My Favorites. Problem is that AMP sucks and it can cache only a few videos at a time.
Fortunately, there is a better solution. Simply go to the RSS feed in Firefox (click the link or copy-and-paste it into the address box) and download the media files from the links on the resulting page. You can now watch it with your favorite media player such as VLC. That’s it!
Here’s a great way of learning JSF from the JSF For Non-Believers series by Rick Hightower at IBM Developerworks.
Pretty good although one thing to watch out for is that you need to change the faces-config.xml from the DTD used by JSF 1.1 to the Schema used by JSF 1.2.
Comment on source code:
/*
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again:
the following chunk o’stuff should likely be in common.jsp
since it’s used in several places.
When I get some free time, I’ll add it and will clean up
the pages that are using it. –MJ
I don’t believe that because MJ no longer works here. — TF
10 Mar 2001.
*/
I tried my hands on JSF last Friday. It didn’t go as smoothly as I expected.
Being the bleeding edge kind of person :P I set it up using Tomcat 6 and a quick start package from Exadel. The package already has all the jar files you need and you only need to type in (or cut-and-paste) some missing java code and jsp scripts. That done, I tried accessing /jskfs/pages. It didn’t work so I tried accessing directly inputname.jsp:
java.lang.NullPointerException
com.sun.faces.taglib.jsf_core.LoadBundleTag.doStartTag(LoadBundleTag.java:96)
I figured, hey maybe I should try the latest reference implementation. That would also be in keeping up with being a bleeding edge kind of person :P So I went to Sun and downloaded latest reference implementation mojarra-1.2_09-b02-FCS-binary.zip, installed it to /jskfs/WEB-INF/lib, and again tried accessing inputname.jsp:
javax.servlet.ServletException: java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: com.sun.faces.taglib.jsf_core.LoadBundleTag.setBasename(Ljava/lang/String;)
It got worse. Figuring that the reference implementation is incomplete (don’t ask why). So I went to Apache.org and downloaded MyFaces, their implementation of JSF: myfaces-core-1.2.4-bin.zip. I installed it and tried again:
SEVERE: Error configuring application listener of class com.sun.faces.config.ConfigureListener
I took a look at the web.xml file, found, and commented this out:
<listener>
<listener-class>com.sun.faces.config.ConfigureListener</listener-class>
</listener>
I tried again:
javax.servlet.ServletException: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com/sun/faces/taglib/jsf_core/LoadBundleTag
I read somewhere that flushing the web app’s files in the work directory sometimes works so I did and then tried again:
javax.servlet.jsp.JspException: No faces context?!
org.apache.myfaces.taglib.core.LoadBundleTag.doStartTag(LoadBundleTag.java:77)
I tried accessing via the entry point /jskfs/pages. It finally worked.
On a hunch, I went full circle and restored the original jar files, cleared the work directory, and tried accessing via the entry point again. Guess what? It worked 8-}