Introducing JSF

JSF 2.0 introduced a number of enhancements to make JSF application development easier. In the following few sections, we will explore some of these features.

Readers not familiar with earlier versions of JSF may not understand the following few sections completely. Not to worry, everything will be perfectly clear by the end of this chapter.

Facelets

One notable difference between modern versions of JSF and earlier versions is that Facelets is now the preferred view technology. Earlier versions of JSF used Java Server Pages (JSP) as their default view technology. Since the JSP technology predates JSF, sometimes using JSP with JSF felt unnatural or created problems. For example, the JSP lifecycle is different...