Pro JSF and Ajax

--JavaServer Faces specification
F
or those of you who have not had a chance to get acquainted with JSF before reading this
book, this chapter will give you a fast-paced introduction to its core functionality. If you are
already familiar with JSF, you may still find some of the discussion of component and lifecycle
architecture to be of interest, because these topics are fundamental to your understanding of
the rest of this book. This chapter will cover application development, give an overview of JSF
and how it relates to other similar frameworks, and provide an in-depth examination of the
JSF architecture and its component model. By the end of this chapter, you should understand
the JSF architecture, its building blocks, and its request lifecycle.
Before jumping into the architecture of JSF, we'll define the audience for JSF (and ulti-
mately for this book). The JSF specification defines the types of developers who make up the
core audience: page authors, application developers, component writers, tools providers, and
JSF implementers, as shown in Table 1-1.
Table 1-1.
JSF Developer Types*
Type
Description
Page author
A page author is responsible for creating the UI and has knowledge
about markup and scripting languages, as well as the rendering
technology such as JavaServer Pages (JSP). According to the JSF
specification, this developer type is generally not familiar with
programming languages such as Java or Visual Basic.
Application developer
An application developer is, according to the JSF specification, in
charge of the server-side functionality of an application that may or
may not be related to the UI. The technical skills of an application
developer generally include Java, Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs), or other
server technologies.
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