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jsfjakarta-ee

Using com.sun.faces with Jakarta EE

I'm trying to upgrade a legacy Java EE application to Jakarta EE 8 on a Wildfly server. Most of the upgrade has gone smoothly since 8 doesn't swap the package names to jakarta yet. However, some of our code is using classes from Oracle's com.sun.faces package. These classes appear to be included in the Jakarta EE Faces API specification, but they are not included in our project when I use the following Maven dependency:

<dependency>
    <groupId>jakarta.faces</groupId>
    <artifactId>jakarta.faces-api</artifactId>
    <version>2.3.2</version>
    <scope>provided</scope>
</dependency>

To get these in the classpath, I have to use the Oracle dependency:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.sun.faces</groupId>
    <artifactId>jsf-impl</artifactId>
    <version>2.2.20</version>
    <scope>provided</scope>
</dependency>

Obviously, we want to ditch using this package altogether at some point, but I was hoping there was a way to include this in our Jakarta migration.

Solution

  • The com.sun.faces.* is not part of Jakarta EE API. It's part of the Jakarta EE implementation. More precisely, it's the actual JSF implementation. Its name is "Mojarra".

    You should indeed not need to have a dependency on it in your pom.xml in order to be JEE-implementation-independent (i.e. in order to be able to deploy your webapp to any JEE-compatible server without any code changes). If the code however doesn't compile when you remove it, then you apparently have somewhere a hard dependency on it, e.g. a hardcoded import or superclass referring to com.sun.faces.* package. This is indeed usually not correct.

    The solution should be straight forward:

    1. Remove that Mojarra dependency
    2. Find all compilation errors
    3. Fix them one by one by using the standard JSF API approach
    4. If no one could be found, research or ask on Stack Overflow

    See also: