When we heard about JavaServer™ Faces (JSF) at the 2002 Java One conference, we were very excited. Both of us had extensive experience with client-side Java programming, and had lived to tell the tale David in Graphic Java, and Cay in Core Java, both published by Sun Microsystems Press. When we first tried web programming with servlets and JavaServer Pages (JSP), we found it to be rather unintuitive and tedious. JavaServer Faces promised to put a friendly face in front of a web application, allowing programmers to think about text fields and menus instead of fretting over page flips and request parameters. Each of us proposed a book project to the publisher, who promptly suggested that we should jointly write the Sun Microsystems Press book on this technology. It took the JSF expert group (of which David is a member) another two years to release the JSF 1.0 specification and reference implementation. This release fulfills many of the original promises. You really can design web user interfaces by putting components on a form and linking them to Java objects, without having to write any code at all. The framework was designed for tool support, and the first batch of drag-and-drop GUI builders is now emerging. The framework is extensible you are not limited to the standard set of HTML components, and you can even use completely different rendering technologies, to support, for example, wireless devices. And finally, unlike competing technologies that let you tumble down a deep cliff once you step beyond the glitz, JSF supports the hard stuff separation of presentation and business logic, navigation, connections with external services, and configuration management. Of course, being a 1.0 release, the current version of JSF is far from perfect. Some of the APIs are awkward. We supply you with utility classes in the com.corejsf.util package to reduce your pain. Also, there are fewer components than we originally expected. While JSF has a powerful and convenient data table component, some useful components such as tabbed panes, scrollers, file uploads, and so on, were not included for lack of time. In the book, we show you how to implement these features. Of course, we expect the next release of JSF to remedy many of these shortcomings. We are still excited about JSF, and we hope you will share this excitement when you learn how this technology makes you a more effective web application developer. |
