In
JSF, the URL is not so much a page locator as it is a session "handle", which is why it doesn't track directly to views.
Trying to work directly brute-force with URLs in JSF can be a problem, however. Quite aside from the fact that they make even getting the URL difficult (JSF is built on an abstraction and doesn't assume that the app is always based on the web or
servlets). JSF makes extensive use of form postbacks, which are HTTP POST-based, so the same logic that got entered originally via an HTTP GET may spend most of its life dealing with POST.
All is not lost, however. JSF2 added better support for "bookmarkable" JSF URLs. Also, you can install and use the PrettyFaces add-on from OCPsoft (ocpsoft.com), which I think is a subsidiary of Red Hat
JBoss these days. At least Lincoln Baxter, who created PrettyFaces (and occasionally visits here) works for JBoss these days.
PrettyFaces makes bookmarkable URLs trivial. You basically add a small jar to WEB-INF/lib, put in a minor addition to web.xml, and add annotations to the backing beans that you want to have bookmarkable URLs. Or, if you prefer, use the legacy pretty-config.xml file.
PrettyFaces works on the idea that you provide a URL template that allows you to define a simple bookmarkable URL in the format you want, plus optional URL parameters which are mapped to backing bean properties. Once you do that, the actual
Java code becomes POJO: the URL fires an action method, and when the action is invoked, the URL parameters have been pre-injected into their corresponding bean properties automatically.
However, I don't think that a bookmarkable URL alone is going to resolve issues with the forward and back browser buttons. That's a whole different can of worms.
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