The Java EE 5 Tutorial

Application Configuration Resource File

JavaServer Faces technology provides a portable configuration format (as an XML document) for configuring resources. An application architect creates one or more files, called application configuration resource files, that use this format to register and configure objects and to define navigation rules. An application configuration resource file is usually called faces-config.xml.

The application configuration resource file must be valid against the schema located at http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-facesconfig_1_2.xsd.

In addition, each file must include the following, in this order:

You can have more than one application configuration resource file. The JavaServer Faces implementation finds the file or files by looking for the following:

To access resources registered with the application, an application developer uses an instance of the Application class, which is automatically created for each application. The Application instance acts as a centralized factory for resources that are defined in the XML file.

When an application starts up, the JavaServer Faces implementation creates a single instance of the Application class and configures it with the information you configure in the application configuration resource file.