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

Getting started with Facelets


One of the goals of the Facelets view definition framework is to simplify designing composite views in a JSF application. The Composite View design pattern is an approach to user interface development that encourages subdivision and reuse of view elements, such as headers, footers, navigation menus, and more. Let's examine how the Facelets framework supports this approach. Facelets includes a number of useful tags for assembling JSF views from smaller elements.

Note

What is a Facelet?

We can think of a Facelet as a subset of a user interface comprised of zero or more UI components. In this chapter, we will begin by looking at some of the basic tags in the Facelets tag library and will progress towards a more complex composite view implementation based on advanced Facelets templating concepts.

Hello World Facelets

First, let's begin with a very simple example of a Facelets page to highlight some key similarities and differences between Facelets and JSP. The following...