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

A brief history of Java web development


Before we dive into the details of the Facelets framework, let's review a brief history of web development on the Java platform to understand how Facelets fits into this broader context.

Before Model-View-Controller (MVC) web frameworks and templating systems such as Struts, Tiles, Tapestry, JSF, and Facelets, building web applications on the Java platform involved writing Java Servlets and JavaServer Pages (JSPs).

JSP technology was introduced in 1999 as a competitor to Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) and PHP. JSP made it easier for Java developers to separate programming logic from web page markup, and introduced the concept of custom tag libraries. Developers could now write custom tag classes that could encapsulate presentation logic, register them in a Tag Library Descriptor (TLD) file, and use them declaratively in a JSP page simply by adding an import directive at the top of the page.

The Struts framework was originally launched in 2000...