JSF Introduction - An Introduction to JSF Technology
Java Server Faces or JSF for short is another new exciting technology for developing web applications based on Java technologies. This JSF Introduction section introduces you with cool JSF technology. In this "JSF Introduction" section you will be introduced with the JSF technology, reasons that initiated the development of JSF and the benefits of JSF.
Why JSF?
Let's first understand the reasons that initiated the JSF project and why JSF is so hot these days. There are reasons for development of new framework in-spite of many already existing technologies like JSP, Servlets, Struts etc... If you have developed complex web based applications in jsp then you must be knowing the problem faced with those technologies. Here are the list of some of the problems faced with the previous technologies like JSP and Servlets:
- Tedious and repetitive coding
Previous technologies like JSP make programmer to do a lot of tedious and repetitive coding.
- Directly working with HTTP request and response
Using these technologies programmers directly work with HTTP request and response objects and manipulates the data. For example if user submits the registration form then programmer writes the code to get the values of each element in the form into a variable for further processing. When there is a need to retrieve the data from database and then show on the form for editing, then in this case programmer writes the code to retrieve the code from database and then set the values in the forms.
- Non availability of IDE
Non availability of IDE is another major drawback which affects the programmers productivity and development cost of the projects increases.
JSF changes all that by giving intuitive framework to the developers. Furthermore, JSP is specification and many vendors are developing their own implementations. Both free and commercial implementations of JSF are available these days. You can choose any one of them based on your requirement and budget.
Now a days software vendors are developing IDE for developing JSF based applications which is another good news for the learners of JSF framework. Once you are familiar with the core concepts of the JSF you can kick start the development of software projects using any IDE available in the market. These changes in the programming world makes the life of programmer much easier.
Java Server Faces is a component oriented and event driven framework for web applications. JSF eases the development of GUI for web applications. JSF allows the programmers to work with extensible user interfaces like buttons, text boxes, check boxes etc... Programmer writes the code for particular event such as button clicked. This makes programming much easier and now the there is no need to write request and response processing logic.