| Judging from the job advertisements in employment web sites, there are currently two popular techniques for developing web applications. The "rapid development" style, using a visual development environment such as Microsoft ASP.NET. The "hard-core coding" style, writing lots of code to support a high-performance back end such as J2EE (the Java 2 Enterprise Edition).
As we write this book, development teams face a difficult choice. J2EE is an attractive platform. It is highly scalable. It is portable to multiple platforms. It is supported by many vendors. On the other hand, ASP.NET makes it easy to create attractive user interfaces without tedious programming. Of course, programmers want both: a high-performance back end and easy user-interface programming. The promise of JavaServer Faces is to bring rapid user-interface development to server-side Java. If you are familiar with client-side Java development, you can think of JSF as "Swing for server-side applications." If you have experience with JavaServer Pages (JSP), you will find that JSF provides much of the plumbing that JSP developers have to implement by hand. If you already know a server-side framework such as Struts, you will find that JSF uses a similar architecture. NOTE  | You need not know anything about Swing, JSP, or Struts in order to use this book. We assume basic familiarity only with Java and HTML. |
JSF has these parts: A set of prefabricated UI components An event-driven programming model A component model that enables third-party developers to supply additional components
JSF contains all the necessary code for event handling and component organization. Application programmers can be blissfully ignorant of these details and spend their effort on the application logic. For the promise of JSF to be fully realized, we need integrated development environments that generate JSF applications. As we write this chapter, these IDEs are just beginning to be developed. For that reason, we start this tutorial chapter by showing you how to compose a JSF application by hand. When reading the instructions in this chapter, consider that many of the steps can and will be automated in the future. | 