Saturday, October 24, 2009

JSF and beyond

As far as intros to the Java EE go, once you understand the idea of JSP you just start adding layers.

JavaServer Faces (JSF) uses JSP to dispaly pages, however, instead of messing with the URL or setting cookies to keep track of your session, JSF adds Java objects to keep track of that. The objects are Java Beans (not to be confused with EJB) that provide a layer between the JSF container and your Java objects.

That's right, JSF is a container that runs inside a web container. You might think that this would add a ton of overhead, but you'd be surprise at what they squish in there.

JSF was based on the ideas of Struts from Apache. Struts brought a MVC container to the web container. The ease of MVC made people go ga-ga. In the end the number of layers and MVC frameworks exploded. So it would be difficult to try and cover them all. I am going to focus on ICEFaces here on my page since that is what I use.

JSF is an awesome method to make web based applications and over the next couple of posts, I'll show some basic uses.

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