Introduction to JSF

JSF is a specification to build a web user interface from a component model. It encompasses a MVC and templating framework. JSF is a standard library of the Java EE platform. The Java Community Process (JCP) controls the specifications, and the current version is JSF 2.2, which is defined by Java Specification Request (JSR) 334 (https://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=344).

Originally, the promise behind JSF was to bring rapid user interface development to server-side Java. This statement was true when JSF was first conceived; but of course, it is still useful if you would rather not write a lot of JavaScript code and hand crafted boilerplate so as to handle the transformation of an HTTP request to the Java invocations and back-to-page responses. Web technology and, in particular, digital development has leaped off the web pages since JSF 1.0 was conceived in 2004. Back then, JavaScript was not taken as a programming language so seriously as it is now; there was no responsive...