Since you address this to newbie, i want to mention that you should try to avoid casting that at all costs while writing components, this is mostly a hack. We found enough components that do a cast from ExternalContext to HttpServletContext and then make the component unusable inside a portlet environment (for no technical reason). This is often not required, just a wish of the programmer to fall back to an API that he feels more comfortable with. In your example, you could simply use: | FacesContext context = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance(); | ExternalContext externalContext = context.getExternalContext(); | System.out.println(externalContext.getRequestParameterMap().getAttribute("helloForm:firstName")); | System.out.println(externalContext.getRequestParameterMap().getAttribute("helloForm:lastName")); | And it will do the same thing but work in both environment. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3959881#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...