Resource versioning in JSF2
JSF2 made an promising attempt to provide versatile resource versioning but obviously has failed this. After I had used weblets for a while I tried to migrate some JSF2 web application to adhere to this standard. Unfortunately I had to figure out that resource versioning does not work as it has been proposed in the JSF2 spec.
Seem that doing versioning of resources loaded from a classpath location has given the JSF2 implementation team a hard time. The spec was suggesting that a JAR could contain a version number for either the library or even the resource name (e.g. META-INF/resources/library-name/version/resource-name) as described in the blog entry linked above.
Versioning only works for resources loaded from the webroot (e.g webroot/resources/library-name/version/resource-name…) and it looks like the next version of the JSF spec will drop some of the versioning features again.
It is questionable if this versioning mechanism makes any sense, if versioning in JAR files would not be supported at all?
