Originally posted by jaikiran pai:
Hi,
I have worked with JSP, Struts and some web technologies. I have heard about JSF but never worked with the same. Is JSF just a set of JSP tags that help developers create JSPs easily? Does JSF have anything more than this? Also, if the main goal of JSF is to help creating complex JSPs, is JSF not suitable for a small, less complex web UI? Will it be more of a overhead?
Hi Jaikiran,
JSF is a lot more than a set of tags to write JSP pages.
JSF is a full MVC (Model-View-Controller) framework for web applications, this allows you to separate the view rendering technology from the rest of the application - so you could be marking up in wml, xhtml or your own custom format.
JSF is a component-oriented, event-based framework. Component-oriented means that you can use components that have already been developed by others without having to worry about how they work and just drop them into your web page. Also, you can create your own components and reuse them throughout any of your applications.
Event-based means that JSF can respond to user interactions. E.g. if you choose a language from a drop down list (English, German, French, etc.) JSF will receive that event and can respond by returning a localised version of the page in the chosen language.
JSF also includes things like validation of user inputs, takes care of the conversion from text strings on the web page to
java types (int, Object, Number, etc.), internationalisation and dynamic page navigation.
This only scratches the surface of what JSF can do. It is really powerful.
Regards,
Fintan