Problem with customized skin in Oracle ADF Application

Written By: Pascal Alma on April 28, 2008 No Comment

For an Oracle ADF application (ADF BC + JSF 10.1.3.3) we are using a customized skin. This is a very powerful technique to have the look and feel of a JSF application being based on the companies wishes. With a few changes in an existing skin (that is for instance supplied by Oracle) you can get great results. However, we ran into a problem after deploying our application. As long as we were running it on a Windows platform everything was okay, but when we deployed it to a Linux environment (Suse Red Hat) suddenly the buttons in our application lost their skin and they were shown as plain old buttons.
The first thing that came to my mind was that was probably an issue with the case-sensitiveness of Linux as opossed to the insensitiveness of the Windows environement. But after double checking all the names in our cascading stylesheet and the names of our images and their directories we couldn’t find any problem with that. Then, luckily I ran into this thread of the Oracle forum where Didier gives the solution. It appears that the issue is caused by the fact that the chosen font in the skin (Tahoma, in our case) is not available in Linux. And for that reason the complete skin for the button is ignored! So now we knew that, we tried to use a font that was installed on our Linux server and yep, the skins for the buttons appeared. So besides checking for the letter case, we will next time also take the installed fonts into account if we are again running into problems that only appears in Linux and not in Windows.