Practical RichFaces, Second Edition

CHAPTER 1 THE BASICS
When Starting with JSF, Keep an Open Mind
It’s not difficult to find forums, blog posts, and other resources from people who are just starting with
JSF and are dissatisfied with the framework. You must remember that most people who are starting with
JSF are coming from JSP, Struts, or a similar homegrown framework. When they start evaluating JSF,
they bring the same style and development approach to JSF that they used with JSP and Struts. This is
where all the problems start.
You can’t take that approach and use it with JSF. It provides a whole different paradigm to web
development—as we’ve explained. The user interface is developed from UI components; it’s very
different from what people are used to doing with JSP and Struts. So when someone tries to do simple
things in a “JSP way” in JSF, they fail and get frustrated. He might say, “But I could do this in JSP in about
five minutes.” Of course, he or she probably could, but JSP is not really doing anything more than mixing
Java and HTML. JSP provides so little abstraction that you can do basically anything—even if in most
cases it isn’t done correctly, the key is that it was still accomplished one way or another.
This approach doesn’t work anymore in JSF. Before you become dissatisfied with JSF, it’s important
to spend at least some time learning the framework and understanding how it works before actually
evaluating it for a project. Put your JSP or Struts approach aside for a second, and learn how to build web
applications using UI components. We promise that you will have much more success with JSF this way.
Summary
This chapter briefly introduced JSF, Ajax, and RichFaces. The goal was to give you a general picture of
how all these technologies fit together. In Chapter 2, you’ll install the tools you’ll use in this book, and
then you will jump into using one of the first RichFaces tags, .