Overview

JavaServer Faces technology includes:

• A set of APIs for representing UI components and managing their state, handling events and input validation, defining page navigation, and supporting internationalization and accessibility.
• A JavaServer Pages (JSP) custom tag library for expressing a JavaServer Faces interface within a JSP page.

Designed to be flexible, JavaServer Faces technology leverages existing, standard UI and web-tier concepts without limiting developers to a particular mark-up language, protocol, or client device. The UI component classes included with JavaServer Faces technology encapsulate the component functionality, not the client-specific presentation, thus enabling JavaServer Faces UI components to be rendered to various client devices. By combining the UI component functionality with custom renderers, which define rendering attributes for a specific UI component, developers can construct custom tags to a particular client device. As a convenience, JavaServer Faces technology provides a custom renderer and a JSP custom tag library for rendering to an HTML client, allowing developers of Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) applications to use JavaServer Faces technology in their applications.

Ease-of-use being the primary goal, the JavaServer Faces architecture clearly defines a separation between application logic and presentation while making it easy to connect the presentation layer to the application code. This design enables each member of a web application development team to focus on his or her piece of the development process, and it also provides a simple programming model to link the pieces together. For example, web page developers with no programming expertise can use JavaServer Faces UI component tags to link to application code from within a web page without writing any scripts.

Developed through the Java Community Process under JSR - 314, JavaServer Faces technology establishes the standard for building server-side user interfaces. With the contributions of the expert group, the JavaServer Faces APIs are being designed so that they can be leveraged by tools that will make web application development even easier. Several respected tools vendors were members of the JSR-314 expert group, which developed the JavaServer Faces 1.0 specification. These vendors are committed to supporting the JavaServer Faces technology in their tools, thus promoting the adoption of the JavaServer Faces technology standard.

Downloads

Download the latest specification and implementation of JavaServer Faces Technology from Mojarra Project.

If you are using GlassFish v3 prelude then you can also download Mojarra using v3 update center using these instructions under the section Installing JSF 2.0.0 PR on GlassFish v3 (including GlassFish Prelude)

Implementation of JavaServer Faces Technology (Mojarra) 2.0 is also available in the v3 nightly builds

Documentation

JavaServer Faces Technology Tutorial : Reference the JavaServer Faces tutorial included in the JavaEE tutorial.

True Abstraction: Composite UI Components in JSF 2.0 -- Part 2 Part 1 of this Tech Tip showed you how to create a composite UI component and use it in a web application. In Part 2, you will learn how to add functionality to the composite component that you created.

True Abstraction: Composite UI Components in JSF 2.0 -- Part 1 This Tech Tip introduces a powerful new feature in JavaServer Faces (JSF) 2.0 technology: composite user interface (UI) components. This feature allows you to turn any collection of page markup into a JSF UI component--with attached validators, converters, action listeners, and value change listeners--for use by page authors.

Training

Developing Web Applications using JSF Technologies: This three-day course covers an in-depth look at JSF 2.0 technology, including templating, Ajax, validation, conversion, working with data sources, composite components, and much more. With this course you will gain the skills necessary to build rich web-based applications with the JavaServer Faces framework.

Community

Forum : Drop in to the webtier forum (webtier@glassfish.java.net) to discuss JavaServerFaces technology. To subscribe to the mailing list please visit - https://glassfish.java.net/servlets/ProjectMailingListList and scroll down and click on subscribe. Post to the forum here.

Join us in the chat room at irc.freenode.net Converse with members of the team working on JavaServer Faces technology by joining our public chat, reachable with any IRC client. Join us in the ##jsf chat room at irc.freenode.net

The Java Enterprise Community on java.net The Java Enterprise Community is a gathering place for developers working with Java EE technologies.

Tutorials

To learn more about JavaServer Faces Technology, please refer to Java EE 5 Tutorial.