| This book is suitable for web developers whose main focus is user interface design, as well as for programmers who implement reusable components for web applications. This is in stark contrast to the official JSF specification, a dense and pompously worded document whose principal audience is framework implementors, as well as long-suffering book authors. The first half of the book, extending to the middle of Chapter 6, focuses on the JSF tags. These tags are similar to HTML form tags. They are the basic building blocks for JSF user interfaces. No programming is required for use of to use the tags. We only assume only basic HTML skills for web pages and standard Java programming for the business logic. The first part of the book covers these topics: Setting up your programming environment (Chapter 1) Connecting JSF tags to application logic (Chapter 2) Navigating between pages (Chapter 3) Using the standard JSF tags (Chapters 4 and 5) Converting and validating input (Chapter 6)
Starting with the final sections of Chapter 6, we begin JSF programming in earnest. You will learn how to perform advanced tasks, and how to extend the JSF framework. Here are the main topics of the second part: Implementing custom converters and validators (Chapter 6) Event handling (Chapter 7) Including common content among multiple pages (Chapter 8) Implementing custom components (Chapter 9) Connecting to databases and other external services (Chapter 10) Supporting wireless clients (Chapter 11)
We end the book with a chapter that aims to answer common questions of the form "How do I….?" We encourage you to have a peek at that chapter as soon as you become comfortable with the basics of JSF. There are helpful notes on debugging and logging, and we also give you implementation details and working code for features that are missing from JSF 1.0, such as file uploads, popup menus, and a pager component for long tables. JSF is built on top of servlets and JSP, but from the point of view of the JSF developer, these technologies merely form the low-level plumbing. While it can't hurt to be familiar with other web technologies such as servlets, JSP, or Struts, we do not assume any such knowledge. | 