It looks like the cause of the diff is the javax.faces.ViewState moving within the form. I will reproduce and investigate.

The attribute ordering of the form is different too.

Before: <form name="..." method="..." id="..." action="...">

After: <form action="..." id="v31jf08" method="..." name="...">

It's true that the attribute ordering is different, but this is not a significant difference from the point of view of the DOM diff – attributes are checked for their existence, but the order is not a factor.

ah, good to know, thanks!

Problem reproduced with provided .war file. Will test again with updated binaries.

Updating icefaces jar files produces the following exception:

16:27:28,521 ERROR [jsp:154] java.lang.IllegalStateException: Component ID 1326672783:f2:f2_viewstate has already been found in the view.
at com.sun.faces.util.Util.checkIdUniqueness(Util.java:820)
at com.sun.faces.util.Util.checkIdUniqueness(Util.java:804)
at com.sun.faces.util.Util.checkIdUniqueness(Util.java:804)
at com.sun.faces.application.view.StateManagementStrategyImpl.saveView(StateManagementStrategyImpl.java:134)

Provided .war file contains two copies of mojarra, which may be a problem:

1870646 08-09-10 20:17 WEB-INF/lib/jsf-impl-2.0.3-FCS.jar
1878770 08-09-10 17:32 WEB-INF/lib/jsf-impl-2.0.4-b01.jar

Ya I noticed that last night. This is due to the ICEfaces 2.0 POM requiring 2.0.3-FCS and the bridge POM requiring 2.0.4-b01. This should be resolved when we sync up on the next release of Mojarra by Oracle.

The multiple JSF .jars do not appear to be the source of the problem.

BridgeSetup.java adds a form to the page for retrieveUpdateSetup. ExtrasSetup.java adds *hdnFieldsDiv to all forms. The interaction between these two SystemEventListeners appears to behave differently during initial page view and ajax updates, resulting in different placement of javax.faces.ViewState.

Since this DOM update does not affect a visible form, it is likely harmless (from the user's point of view), but inefficient.

Assigning to Mircea to fix for 2.0 (not essential for beta2). Neil, please let us know if this fix is actually critical for Portlet support and we can re-prioritize for beta2.

The issue is not essential, not critical for portlet support. It is indeed harmless (from the user's point of view). The inefficiency only happens on the first paritalSubmit, and not thereafter.

Removed code that was rendering ViewState input hidden field during postback. This stops ICEfaces from generating an update for the parent 'form' element. In case the form is updated the ViewState input element is restored by the bridge (see ICE-5691 ).