JSF Overview

The quick Overview of JSF Technology

This section gives you an overview of Java Server Faces technology, which simplifies the development of Java Based web applications. In this JSF overview section you will learn how JSF fits into the web application development landscape.

 JSF was developed by Java Community Process(JCP). This is a community of web application experts. These experts  are from different groups like Jakarta Struts, Oracle, Sun, IBM, ATG etc. They all collectively worked together to take the best from existing technologies and removed problems. So their collective effort brought a new technology named Java Server Faces (JSF).

Java Server Faces or JSF for short, is the standard framework to simplify the process of developing web application in java. It is a robust component framework, event driven programming model. It offers a set of UI components, extensible architecture, supports multiple client devices etc. Extensible means additional functionality can be given on the top of JSF core i.e. we can customize the functionality. JSF is vendor independent technology that is  a standard to be supported by whole software industry.

One of the main feature of JSF is that it has not only been designed for coding experts but for others also like :

1. Page authors
   Web designers have experience with graphic design. They can design look and feel of web application in html/jsp using custom tag libraries of JSF.
    
2. Application developers
   Application developers can integrate this design with UI components. They program objects, event handles, converters, validators.
    
3. Component writers
   Component developer can build custom UI components because of JSF’s extensible and customizable nature. They can create their own components directly from UI component classes or extending the standard components of JSF.
    
4. Application architects 
   Application architects are responsible for designing web applications. Defining page navigation, ensuring Scalability of application, configuring beans object registration are the key points that an application architect handles.
    
5. Tool vendors
   JSF is well suited for tool vendors, for example Sun Java Studio Creator application development tool, who provide tools that take advantages of JSF to create UI easier.

In the past many  web development frameworks came in to existence founded on servlet and jsp. Struts emerged as a standard web application framework. It became framework of choice because it came early in the market and provided  necessary features at the time but competitors continued providing  additional features that struts lacks. So it became necessary for java to advent new standard framework with a powerful component model. This was the reason for developing JSF technology. So main purpose of developing JSF was to create a collection of APIs for the UI components with the capacity to manage their states, handle events and validation.

Struts has an option to migrate to JSF. The simplest option is to use JSF components and rest as usual. This will enable them to take advantage of third party JSF components. Main feature of JSF is ease of use. Developing web applications is easier and faster than other frameworks like struts because JSF supports UI components and easy event handling. Taking advantages of third party components can reduce the cost of rewriting existing elements, minimize the time of development.