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A first look at JavaServer Faces, Part 1

Learn how to implement Web-based user interfaces with JSF

By David Geary, JavaWorld.com, 11/29/02

Page 2 of 6

Note: Struts developers needn't worry; although JSF and Struts have much in common, JSF will not make Struts obsolete. See Resources for a discussion of an integration strategy for Struts and JavaServer Faces.

Currently, JSF is an early access (EA) release, and, as a result, is somewhat immature. The specification leaves some functionality unspecified, and the specification and reference implementation are currently out of sync, with the former specifying new syntaxes and functionality not yet implemented in the latter. On the other hand, JSF is mature enough for you to write code against—although much of that code is guaranteed to be obsolete (see the disclaimer below)—and the reference implementation is fairly complete and relatively bug-free. You can download the JSF specification, the reference implementation, two sample applications, and a JSF tutorial from Resources.

The two articles in this series provide a code-intensive introduction to JavaServer Faces. In this article, I begin with a short discussion of the JSF lifecycle and then dive into some example code that illustrates implementation of Web-based user interfaces with JSF and how you can take advantage of built-in validation. In Part 2, I will explain more advanced JSF concepts such as: implementing custom validation; using model objects; internationalization; creating custom components; and finally, delegating event handling and rendering so you can use components to generate markup languages other than HTML.

Disclaimer: The code discussed in this article was written against the EA2 JSF reference implementation. As mentioned above, the specification and reference implementation are in a state of flux, and therefore, the code in this article is guaranteed to be obsolete in the near future; however, the code works as advertised with the EA2 reference implementation and was tested with both Tomcat 4.0.6 (the latest production release of Tomcat) and Resin 2.1.6. Furthermore, you can read the JSF specification until the cows come home, but to really grasp the concepts, you must ruminate over some code.

The JavaServer Faces lifecycle

JSF handles HTTP requests with seven distinct phases, as shown in Figure 1. The normal flow of control is shown with solid lines, whereas dashed lines show alternate flows depending on whether a component requests a page redisplay or validation or conversion errors occur.

The Reconstitute Request Tree phase creates a component tree for the requested page. If that page previously displayed and JSF saved the page's state information, the state information is added to the request. This means that JSF automatically retains form information when a form redisplays; for example, when a user does not correctly fill out a form. This handy feature is a fundamental capability provided by Microsoft's WebForms, but is otherwise absent from J2EE.

During the Apply Request Values phase, the JSF implementation iterates over the components in the component tree and calls each component's decode() method. That method extracts information from the request and stores it in the component. Optionally, components may delegate decoding to a renderer.