It is really not so early to start working with the upcoming JSF 2.3 and testing it. In this post, I will show you how to get started in JSF 2.3 by building JSF (Mojarra) jars from its source then use them for your JSF 2.3 application which will run in Tomcat 7.

Building JSF Jars from SVN:

First of all, you need to make sure that you have both SVN and Apache Ant installed and configured in your operating system. Check out the source code using the following SVN command: svn checkout https://svn.java.net/svn/mojarra~svn/trunk In order to build the JSF Mojarra jars for Apache Tomcat then create a new file called build.properties under trunk . Then copy build.properties.tomcat file (which is located directly under trunk) content into it. Do not forget to set jsf.build.home property to the directory in which the sources were checked out into as follows for example. # -------------------------------------------------- # Set this to the directory in which the sources # were checked out into # -------------------------------------------------- jsf.build.home=/Users/hazems/projects/mojarra23/trunk CD to the jsf.build.home path, and then execute the following ant command: ant clean main After the successful execution of the previous command, you can get Mojarra jars from: jsf-api-intermediate.jar from trunk/jsf-api/build/lib directory. javax.faces.jar from trunk/jsf-ri/build/lib directory.

Configuring your first JSF 2.3 application:

Simply all what you need to work with JSF 2.3 in Tomcat 7 is to do the following:

Place the two Mojarra jars in step 4 in your web application WEB-INF/lib folder.

Set the JSF version in the faces-config.xml to 2.3 as follows. <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?> <faces-config version="2.3" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-facesconfig_2_3.xsd"> </faces-config>

Then now, you can write your JSF application and it will be powered by the upcoming JSF 2.3. I made a very basic JSF 2.3 sample which you can reach its code in the following GitHub URL:

https://github.com/hazems/jsf2.3-work/tree/master/sampleJSF1

In my next JSF 2.3 posts, I will show you some of the JSF 2.3 implemented features “so far” in order to allow you to start working with them so stay tuned.