JavaServer Faces Technology

JavaServer Faces technology is a user interface framework for building web applications. The main components of JavaServer Faces technology are as follows:

• A GUI component framework.

• A flexible model for rendering components in different kinds of HTML or different markup languages and technologies. A Renderer object generates the markup to render the component and converts the data stored in a model object to types that can be represented in a view.

• A standard RenderKit for generating HTML/4.01 markup.

The following features support the GUI components:

• Input validation

• Event handling

• Data conversion between model objects and components

• Managed model object creation

• Page navigation configuration

All this functionality is available using standard Java APIs and XML-based configuration files.

In the Java EE 6 platform, new features of JavaServer Faces include the following:

• The ability to use annotations instead of a configuration file to specify managed beans

• Facelets, a display technology that replaces JavaServer Pages (JSP) technology using XHTML files

• Ajax support

• Composite components

• Implicit navigation