JSF Components

Components in JSF are elements like text box, button, table etc.. that are used to create UI of JSF Applications. These are objects that manage interaction with a user. You can create :

1. Simple components, like text box, button and

2. Compound components, like table, data grid .   

A component containing many components inside it is called a compound component. Components help developers to create UIs by assembling a number of components , associating them with object properties and event handlers. Would u like to repeat the same code again & again and waste time if u want to create many tables in hundreds of pages in your web application? Not at all. Once you create a component, it’s simple to drop that component onto any JSP.

JSF allows you to create and use components of two types:

1. Standard UI Components: 
   JSF contains its basic set of  UI components like text fields, check boxes , list boxes, panel , label, radio button etc. These are called standard components. For example:
   
   UIForm               represents a user input form that is a container of other components.    
   UICommand       represents UI components like buttons, hyperlinks and menu items.
   UIInput               represents UI components like text input fields, numeric input fields.
   

2. Custom UI Components:
   Generally UI designers need some different , stylish components like fancy calendar, tabbed panes . These types of components are not standard JSF components. JSF provides this additional facility to let you create and use  your own set of reusable components .These components are called custom components.
    
   One of the greatest power of JSF is to support third party components .Third party components are custom components created by another vendor. Several components are available in the market ,some of them are commercial and some are open source . You can use these pre-built & enhanced components in UI of your web application .Suppose u need a stylish calendar , u have an option to take it from third party rather than creating it .This will help you to save your time & cost creating effective & robust UI and to concentrate on business logic part of web application.
   If u want to create custom components then its necessary to either implement UIComponent interface or extend UIComponentBase class that provides default behavior of components. These may be responsible for its own display or the renderer is used for its display. These components are stored in component tree on the server and they maintain state in between client requests. These components are manipulated on the sever in java code.
   So the final conclusion of using third party components is that a more attractive , robust and functional UI can be created with fewer time, cost and man power.