One of the strong properties of JSF is the fact that it has the ability to use various view technologies. The default view technology in JSF 1.x is JavaServer Pages (JSP). Because the JSP standard was defined before JSF even existed, it was never optimized for use with JSF. Therefore, JSP has quite a few shortcomings as a view technology for JSF. Facelets aims to overcome these shortcomings. Although Facelets is not an official standard yet, it doesn’t make sense not to use it. In JSF 2.0, Facelets is part of the standard and is the preferred view technology.
Facelets is not part of Apache MyFaces. This chapter is included in this book as not much documentation is available on Facelets yet.
After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
Convince anyone that Facelets should be used as the view technology for any new JSF project
Set up a JSF project with Facelets
Create and use Facelets page templates
Create and use you own composition components with Facelets