Single-page applications

The design philosophy behind building an application on a single page such that it resembles a desktop application is in marked contrast to the JavaServer Faces' original design of navigation links between pages. JSF 1.0 was created in the early noughties, long before the rediscovery of the XMLHttpRequest JavaScript object and Google Maps in 2005, so that historical note should not be a surprise (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaServer_Faces). It is entirely possible to write JSF as a single-page application, but I would not recommend the effort of forcing a square peg into a round hole! JSF lends itself to applications that are extremely stateful in nature and design, where the customer journey is based on page-to-page navigation. In the previous chapters, we have already covered a great deal about stateful web applications with JSF, flow scopes, conversations, and view-scoped beans. If you are not thorough with those concepts, then I strongly recommend you revise...