There is a bug in Facelets that is throwing an exception for every IceFaces tag on the page. This is a Facelets bug not IceFaces, but since it is likely negatively affecting the performance of IceFaces when used with facelets, I thought I would pass on the information.

The facelets code in question, com.sun.facelets.util.DevTools.writeAttributes, swallows the exception so it's not causing functional problems, but it can't be very good for performance. What is happening is that the writeAttributes method uses Introspector.getBeanInfo, followed by getPropertyDescriptors on each component to create a list of attributes to write out. Unfortunately, there is a bug in their code, so they don't do a null check on the readMethod of the propertyDescriptor before invoking it, so any descriptor that is found through the Introspector, that does not have a read method will generate a NullPointerException. When the Introspector does a getBeanInfo on the IceFaces UIXhtmlComponent class it finds the setXmlAttributes method and returns it in the list of propertyDescriptors, but there is no matching getXmlAttributes so it falls into the case I just described and generates an NPE for every component.

I have logged an issue with Facelets:
https://facelets.dev.java.net/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=316

This issue is in every version of Facelets I have looked at to date.

Anyway, I thought someone would like to know and make a call as to whether to create a BeanInfo for UIXhtmlComponent or some other workaround until the facelets team can address the issue.