Section 5.1. The Sample Application

5.1. The Sample Application

JSF is a big topic, and we can't cover it all here, but we did want to provide you with a complete application to look at. Our sample application lets us cover the most frequently used JSF functions. We'll reproduce bits of the code here, and you can download the whole thing from this book's web site, at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/javaentnut3/.

The sample application itself is a simple library book management system that implements the following use cases:

• Log in as a user (with Borrower or Librarian privileges)

• Add a book (Librarians)

• View available books (everyone)

• Check out a book (Librarians, Borrowers)

• Check in a book (Librarians)

• Review all books

In order to compile the examples, you'll want the full JSF 1.1 reference implementation from Sun, which is available at http://java.sun.com/j2ee/javaserverfaces/. You'll need a Servlet 2.3-compatible web container as well; we used JBoss 4.0, available from http://jboss.org, to develop and test the sample application. In the downloadable version, we've also included an Ant buildfile for building the sample application.