While Sun recently abandoned support for Project Woodstock, an open-source JSF component repository launched in early 2007, love and peace may still reign for NetBeans users as they look to migrate their Woodstock applications to ICEfaces. 

ICEsoft technologies and the NetBeans community this week jointly announced a new migration path for existing Project Woodstock applications to ICEfaces, an open source Ajax framework for building and deploying rich, JSF-based applications.  Earlier this month, the ICEfaces community celebrated the one millionth download of the framework in less than two years.  

With the latest ICEfaces plugin for NetBeans IDE 6.5 ( available here), it is now possible to add the ICEfaces framework to an existing Woodstock project, and begin to develop ICEfaces pages along side existing Woodstock pages.  To this end, ICEsoft has also assembled a Component Migration Matrix to aid in the mapping of Woodstock components to ICEfaces. 

In his blog, ICEsoft CTO Steve Maryka highlighted the runtime integration that ICEfaces has long offered for the Sun Glassfish server and emphasized this week’s announcement as a major integration milestone on the development front --

“… we have always strived to integrate with the Sun IDE of choice. Our efforts started with Java Studio Creator, and have continued with several releases of NetBeans, up to our current integration with NetBeans 6.5. Because Woodstock has been a primary consideration in the NetBeans JSF strategy, integrating ICEfaces into this model has been a major challenge, but we have succeeded in delivering both Visual JSF and Facelet support for ICEfaces in NetBeans.”

The latest release of ICEfaces is available here and includes:

• NetBeans 6.5 project-level coexistence of Woodstock and ICEfaces. The ICEfaces NetBeans plug-in can be downloaded here
• Automated addition of ICEfaces framework into existing Woodstock projects
• Run-time framework integration supporting coexistence of Woodstock and ICEfaces pages in a single web application
• Preliminary documentation including aWoodstock to ICEfaces Porting Guide , and the Component Migration Matrix
•  User support through ICEsoft’s public Woodstock Forum

To learn more about developing Ajax applications with JSF, visit the DZone JSF & Ajax resource center.