Rather than creating a custom control, you might want to use someone else's. There's a menu tag that's part of the Tomahawk
JSF package that's quite well-documented for creating menus dynamically.
If you really want the menu structure in an XML file, you can use this control and one of the various useful XML utilities - the Apache Digester is often a good choice, though a little confusing at first. Or, if your XML structure is simple enough, just implement a small SAX parser.
The secret of how to be miserable is to constantly expect things are going to happen the way that they are "supposed" to happen.
You can have faith, which carries the understanding that you may be disappointed. Then there's being a willfully-blind idiot, which virtually guarantees it.
