Elements of JSF

Now that we have taken a look at the JSF architecture in relation to other frameworks, it is time to dig into JSF itself. This chapter begins that process by giving an overview of essential JSF elements; in other words, those parts of the framework that are key to understanding how it works. We’ll cover JSF UI components, Converters, Validators, Renderers, and much more. In doing so, we’ll explore some of the sample applications provided with the JSF reference implementation.
We’ll continue with these applications in Chapter 3, “JSF Request-Processing Life Cycle,” and Chapter 4, “JSF Configuration,” as well while we finish covering the basics of JSF. In future chapters we’ll present new sample applications as we cover more advanced topics. The hope here is that you become familiar with the JSF reference implementation while learning the basics of JSF.
The goal of this chapter is not a complete examination of each element, since that is the purpose of Chapters 5 to 10. Our goal here is simply to get a good fee  for how JSF is composed and how those parts work together. At the end of this chapter, you will have a good, albeit basic, understanding of how the most important elements of JSF work.
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JSF Tutorial (Pdf and Source Code)

This tutorial is derived from Marty Hall’s world-renowned live JSF training course. Note that the course (and this tutorial) now covers Apache MyFaces 1.1.5. The course is usually taught on-site at customer locations, but servlet, JSP, Ajax, Jakarta Struts, and JSF training courses at public venues are periodically scheduled for people with too few developers for an onsite course. For descriptions of the various other courses that are available, please see the training course page. To inquire about a customized training course at your location, please contact Marty at hall@coreservlets.com. Courses on servlets, JSP, Ajax, Struts, Hibernate, Java 5, Java 6, and Ruby/Rails also available.
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How to Write Your Own JSF Components

The tutorial consists of seven separate steps for building up an example application. Each step adds new code to the previous example. The tutorial includes code representing the result of each step. If you are lost, you can compare these target results with your results. Also, you might want to add some extra feature to the code to test how it works. If this messes things up, you can just replace your code with the included code to go on to the next step.
The tutorial material is divided into seven folders with the names Step1, Step2, Step3, Step4, Step5, Step6, and Step7. Each folder contains only one subfolder named “ticker”. This subfolder contains a working example that represents the result up to that particular step. Additionally, a folder named Step0 contains the skeleton for starting the JSF project.
For this tutorial, you can use any tools that allow you to work directly with source code. We recommend you to use Exadel JSF Studio. JSF Studio allows the running of JSF applications without redeploymen   This is extremely important when you play with the code by adding new features to test how they work. At the same time, JSF Studio allows you to have full control over the source code. We even recommend turning on the “Use Source Tab as a default for multi-tab editors” option in the Preferences Editor (Exadel->Editors section). You can always use the GUI feature of JSF Studio later to slash the development time when you start to understand enough how things works on the source code level. The provided example is fully adapted to work with Exadel JSF Studio.
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JSF and Struts Classic Reference Manual

We are going to show you how to create a simple JSF application using the JBoss Developer Studio plug-in for Eclipse. The completed application will ask a user to enter a name and click a button. The resulting new page will display the familiar message, “Hello <name>!” This document will show you how to create such an application from the beginning, along the way demonstrating some of the powerful features of JBoss Developer Studio. You will design the JSF application and then run the application from inside JBoss Developer Studio. We’ll assume that you have already launched Eclipse with JBoss Developer Studio installed and also that the JBoss Developer Studio perspective is the current one. (If not, make it active by selecting Window > Open Perspective > Web Development from the menu bar or by selecting Window > Open Perspective > Other… from the menu bar and then selecting Web Development from the Select Perspective dialog box.)
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JavaServer Faces Specification

This is the JavaServer Faces 1.2 (JSF 1.2) specification, developed by the JSR-252 expert group under the Java Community Process (see <http://www.jcp.org> for more information about the JCP).

JavaServer Faces (JSF) is a user interface (UI) framework for Java web applications. It is designed to significantly ease the burden of writing and maintaining applications that run on a Java application server and render their UIs back to a target client. JSF provides ease-ofuse in the following ways:
Makes it easy to construct a UI from a set of reusable UI components
Simplifies migration of application data to and from the UI
Helps manage UI state across server requests
Provides a simple model for wiring client-generated events to server-side application code
Allows custom UI components to be easily built and re-used
Most importantly, JSF establishes standards which are designed to be leveraged by tools to provide a developer experience which is accessible to a wide variety of developer types, ranging from corporate developers to systems programmers. A “corporate developer” is characterized as an individual who is proficient in writing procedural code and business logic, but is not necessarily skilled in object-oriented programming. A “systems programmer” understands object-oriented fundamentals, including abstraction and designing for re-use. A corporate developer typically relies on tools for development, while a system programmer may define his or her tool as a text editor for writing code.
Therefore, JSF is designed to be tooled, but also exposes the framework and programming model as APIs so that it can be used outside of tools, as is sometimes required by systems programmers.
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