The Lifecycle of a Facelets Application
The JavaServer Faces specification defines the lifecycle of a JavaServer Faces application. For more information on this lifecycle, see The Lifecycle of a JavaServer Faces Application. The following steps describe that process as applied to a Facelets-based application.
When a client, such as a browser, makes a new request to a page that is created using Facelets, a new component tree or javax.faces.component.UIViewRoot is created and placed in the FacesContext.
The UIViewRoot is applied to the Facelets, and the view is populated with components for rendering.
The newly built view is rendered back as a response to the client.
On rendering, the state of this view is stored for the next request. The state of input components and form data is stored.
The client may interact with the view and request another view or change from the JavaServer Faces application. At this time the saved view is restored from the stored state.
The restored view is once again passed through the JavaServer Faces lifecycle, which eventually will either generate a new view or re-render the current view if there were no validation problems and no action was triggered.
If the same view is requested, the stored view is rendered once again.
If a new view is requested, then the process described in Step 2 is continued.
The new view is then rendered back as a response to the client.