Faces Deployment

Deploying a Faces application is more problematic, especially the first one, than applications that use other frameworks.  During the process of installing the first application, you can create problems that block access to all of your course material and that may be very difficult to analyze.  So, be careful and be precise in following these steps.


Tasks

1. Copy faces-config.xml and web.xml files to WEB-INF directory

This step is straight-forward.  Just copy the files from your development environment to your production or wwwj environment.

2.  Copy JSPs

Presumably you will have created a directory under your Faces project for your view jsps.  Assuming this directory is directly under your project context, copy the directory and its contents to your wwwj context.

3.  Copy class files

Just as with earlier applications, you need to copy your class files to your wwwj context.  Assuming you have used packages names for your classes, you will need to duplicate that package name structure as a directory structure under your WEB-INF directory and copy your .class files to that structure.

4.  Test early!

There are lots of things that can go wrong that you may not be able to fix by yourself, so, test early and test often!  One notable problem you may run into is that if you have an invalid config file, Tomcat may omit your context, meaning you can't access anything in your course directory.  You can test for this by invoking from a browser the url, http://wwwj.cs.unc.edu:8888/your_login, where your_login is, of course, your login.  If you can't get to your coursepage, check your faces-config.xml and web.xml files closely.