After a lot of investigation, the only likely cause of this behaviour is the document type declaration in WildFly8. In tomcat, the document type declaration that gets rendered in the pages tested is this:
Which is the same doctype declaration specified in all the xhtml pages tested. In contrast, in WildFly8, the doctype declaration that gets rendered is always this:
There doesn't seem to be any other cause/difference but this one. The rest of the rendered HTML is identical between tomcat and WildFly8. I verified all the applied CSS styles of several elements that compose the ace:selectMenu and ice:panelTabSet components, and all of them are exactly the same. The only difference is seen in the computed style.
I also tried removing CSS class names from the elements that compose these components as well as removing entire CSS style sheets and specific definitions, and none of that improved the issue.
Custom application CSS styles don't have anything to do either. The issue was still seen using a simple test page like the following:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html"
xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core"
xmlns:ace="http://www.icefaces.org/icefaces/components">
<h:head>
<title></title>
</h:head>
<h:body>
<h:form>
<ace:selectMenu>
<f:selectItem itemValue="test" itemLabel="test" />
</ace:selectMenu>
</h:form>
</h:body>
</html>
Moreover, the ace:selectMenu component doesn't have a CSS file of it's own, and the issue with ice:panelTabset also failed when using a different componen such as ace:comboBox or a simple h:outputText, instead.
It seems that the issue doesn't have to do with CSS, but with the way that elements are arranged, while being under the effects of certain doctype declaration.
I could come up with a simple fix for the ace:selectMenu component, which consists in specifically setting the height of the container to that of the down arrow button. This works well on Tomcat as well. It hasn't been committed yet.
These issues are not dependent on the icefaces-ee-ext.jar being included or not in showcase.war file.