Overview of JavaServer Faces

The main presentation layer technology of Java EE 6 is JSF Version 2.0, which brings a couple of interesting enhancements to the previous version (Version 1.2), such as:

• Composite components that give us the flexibility to combine existing UI tags with new ones

• Native Ajax support

JSF 2.0 has been around for quite some time now, so its features have matured before getting packaged into WebLogic Server 12c, giving us a solid and reliable implementation.

WebLogic Server has native support for JSF Version 2.1 and JSTL 1.2, and these libraries are enabled by default when a server is started; it is available from the classpath. Although the framework is enabled by default, we added it as a shared library to our environment in Chapter 2, Setting Up the Environment, mostly to show how it is done. Also, this approach avoids having to deal with server configuration when you need to update the library, so use it whenever possible.

Note

The JavaServer Faces implementation that...