The Java EE 6 Tutorial, Volume I

Setting Up a Page

A typical JavaServer Faces web page includes the following elements:

A set of namespace declarations that declare the JavaServer Faces tag libraries
Optionally, the new HTML head (h:head) and body (h:body) tags
A form tag (h:form) that represents the user input components

To add the JavaServer Faces components to your web page, you need to provide the page access to the two standard tag libraries: The JavaServer Faces HTML tag library, and the JavaServer Faces core tag library. The JavaServer Faces standard HTML tag library defines tags that represent common HTML user interface components. It is linked to HTML render kit. The JavaServer Faces core tag library defines tags that perform core actions.

Each JavaServer Faces tag must be described by the PDL (Page Declaration Language). For a complete list of JavaServer Faces Facelets tags and their attributes, refer to the PDL documentation at http://java.sun.com/javaee/javaserverfaces/2.0/docs/pdldocs/facelets/index.html.

To use any of the JavaServer Faces tags, you need to include appropriate directives at the top of each page specifying the tag libraries.

For Facelets applications, the XML namespace directives uniquely identify the tag library uri and the tag prefix.

For example, when creating a Facelets XHML page, include namespace directives as follows:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html"
xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core">

The XML namespace uri identifies the tag library location and the prefix value is used to distinguish the tags belonging to that specific tag library. You can also use other prefixes instead of the standard h or f. However, when including the tag in the page, you must use the prefix that you have chosen for the tag library. For example, in the following web page, the form tag must be referenced using the h prefix because the preceding tag library directive uses the h prefix to distinguish the tags defined in HTML tag library:

<h:form ...>

The following sections, Adding Components to a Page Using HTML Tags and Using Core Tags, describe how to use the component tags from the JavaServer Faces standard HTML tag library and the core tags from the JavaServer Faces core tag library.