Mapping the FacesServlet Instance

All JavaServer Faces applications must include a mapping to the FacesServlet instance in their deployment descriptors. The FacesServlet instance accepts incoming requests, passes them to the life cycle for processing, and initializes resources. The following piece of the guessNumber example’s deployment descriptor performs the mapping to the FacesServlet instance:

<servlet>
    <display-name>FacesServlet</display-name>
    <servlet-name>FacesServlet</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>javax.faces.webapp.FacesServlet
    </servlet-class>
    <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>
<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>FacesServlet</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/guess/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

The mapping to FacesServlet shown above uses a prefix mapping to identify a JSP page as having JavaServer Faces components. Because of this, the URL to the first JSP page of the application must include the mapping. To accomplish this, the guessNumber example includes an HTML page that has the URL to the first JSP page:

<a href="guess/greeting.jsp">

See Identifying the Servlet for Life Cycle Processing for more information on how to map the FacesServlet instance.