To add some background info, maxlenth is not a standard attribute of textarea, in the html specification. None of the browsers support it. For javascript solutions, there are two main ones: the complicated and more correct solution of capturing the key presses to discard the most recently pressed key, and the simple one that involves truncating the text. The complicated one can fail at handling pasted values, and is tricky to handle non-input key events. The simple one handles those issues fine, but doesn't exactly properly handle things when the caret is not at the end of the textarea. As well, the text that will be truncated does briefly appear before being discarded.

With all these caveats in mind, we'll go with the simple solution, which is also suggested by the issue originator.

If an application specifies the maxlength attribute on an ice:inputTextarea component, then onkeydown and onchange listeners will be registered, which will truncate the ending of the text, to remain within the limit of number of characters. Extra characters might appear, and then only be truncated once the user presses another key on the keyboard, or clicks away. Especially if text is pasted in.

Subversion 18853
icefaces\bridge\lib\extras\extras.js
icefaces\component-metadata\src\main\resources\conf\ice_properties\ice-inputTextarea-props.xml
icefaces\component\src\com\icesoft\faces\component\ext\HtmlInputTextarea.java
icefaces\component\src\com\icesoft\faces\component\ext\renderkit\TextareaRenderer.java
icefaces\core\src\com\icesoft\faces\renderkit\dom_html_basic\TextareaRenderer.java

QA tested it with success on ICEfaces trunk revision 18864

Test app has been added to the QA repo