Book Image

JSF 1.2 Components

By : IAN HLAVATS
Book Image

JSF 1.2 Components

By: IAN HLAVATS

Overview of this book

Today's web developers need powerful tools to deliver richer, faster, and smoother web experiences. JavaServer Faces includes powerful, feature-rich, Ajax-enabled UI components that provide all the functionality needed to build web applications in a Web 2.0 world. It's the perfect way to build rich, interactive, and "Web 2.0-style" Java web apps. This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the most popular JSF components available today and demonstrate step-by-step how to build increasingly sophisticated JSF user interfaces with standard JSF, Facelets, Apache Tomahawk/Trinidad, ICEfaces, JBoss Seam, JBoss RichFaces/Ajax4jsf, and JSF 2.0 components. JSF 1.2 Components is both an excellent starting point for new JSF developers, and a great reference and “how to” guide for experienced JSF professionals. This book progresses logically from an introduction to standard JSF HTML, and JSF Core components to advanced JSF UI development. As you move through the book, you will learn how to build composite views using Facelets tags, implement common web development tasks using Tomahawk components, and add Ajax capabilities to your JSF user interface with ICEfaces components. You will also learn how to solve the complex web application development challenges with the JBoss Seam framework. At the end of the book, you will be introduced to the new and up-coming JSF component libraries that will provide a road map of the future JSF technologies.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
JSF 1.2 Components
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Comparing Facelets and JSP


Before we can appreciate the advantages that Facelets brings to a JSF application, let's consider the role of JSP as the presentation technology for JSF. By default, the JSF ViewHandler mechanism uses JSP. The ViewHandler is an infrastructural component of the JSF framework that performs an important role during the request processing lifecycle, specifically during the Render Response and Restore View phases. The ViewHandler is responsible for creating, restoring, and rendering the UI component tree for the current view.

JSP was originally designed to solve the problem of how to include dynamic content in a static HTML document. JSPs enable dynamic content to be inserted into an HTML document through the use of scriptlets, expressions, and JSP directives.

These are typically blocks of Java code interspersed with HTML markup. When the JSP page is requested by the browser, the Servlet/JSP container generates a Java servlet from the JSP source code, compiles it, and...