[...]... reusable standards-based JSF components for RIAs So, here we are, hoping that you will enjoy reading this book as much as we enjoyed writing it xxi 5807fm.qxd xxii 1/20/06 4:11 PM Page xxii sINTRODUCTION An Overview of This Book Pro JSF and Ajax: Building Rich Internet Components is written to give you all the means to provide your Web application developers with easy-to-use Rich Internet Components. .. techniques to provide your Web application developers (and users) with enterprise-class JSF components that support multiple clients Obtaining This Book’s Source Code All the examples in this book are freely available from the Source Code section of the Apress Web site Point your browser to http://www .apress. com, click the Source Code link, and find the Pro JSF and Ajax: Building Rich Internet Components. .. Geary and Cay Horstmann (Prentice, 2004) We are also looking forward to seeing Java Server Faces: The Complete Reference, by Ed Burns and Chris Schalk (McGraw-Hill Osborne, 2006), in stores Pro JSF and Ajax: Building Rich Internet Components contains ten chapters that focus on writing JSF components The book’s examples are fairly extensive, so we recommend you download the example source code from the Apress. .. 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, ... hard to handle In contrast, JSF is a standard framework that aims to solve incompatibility 7 5807ch01.qxd 8 1/3/06 4:47 PM Page 8 CHAPTER 1 s THE FOUNDATION OF JSF: COMPONENTS Introducing JSF In short, JSF is a UI component framework for J2EE applications Before we start covering UI components (and by UI components we mean building blocks for application developers, not components of the framework... JSF and covers the basics of writing JSF components, but if you have not acquainted yourself with JSF before reading this book, we strongly encourage you to refer to a few excellent books that will introduce you to JSF and give you the foundation needed to fully appreciate this book We recommend JSF in Action, by Kito D Mann (Manning, 2005), which is an excellent and very complete book on JSF, and. .. editor-in-chief of JSF Central (http://www.jsfcentral.com) and the author of JavaServer Faces in Action (Manning, 2005) He is also a member of the JSF 1.2 and JSP 2.1 expert groups and principal consultant at Virtua, specializing in enterprise application architecture, development, mentoring, and JSF product strategy Kito has consulted with several Fortune 500 clients, including Prudential Financial and J.P Morgan... in Chapters 6, 7, 8, and 9 to build rich interactivity into the date field and deck components Of course, some simple applications in this chapter will highlight the core features of each technology As promised, to be able to successfully build and package JSF components, and especially RICs, you need a solution that can easily package resources, such as JavaScript libraries, CSS, and images, into the... user experience when users interact with your components in a JSF Web application These four chapters leverage everything you have learned so far and guide you through the gotchas of building Ajax-enabled JSF components with HTML, XUL, and HTC These chapters also introduce you to one established and two new open source projects: the Dojo toolkit, Mabon, and D2 Finally, Chapter 10 pulls it all together... in demand for improved usability in Web applications, it is understandable that the hottest topic at the moment is Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) and how they offer distributed, server-based Web applications with a rich interface and the interaction capabilities of desktop applications Although RIAs hold significant promise, they still have issues with compatibility, portability, usability, and reusability . and John R. Fallows Pro JSF and Ajax Building Rich Internet Components 5807fm.qxd 1/20/06 4:11 PM Page i Pro JSF and Ajax: Building Rich Internet Components Copyright © 2006 by Jonas Jacobi and. Faces standard and to extend the standard to provide Ajax functionality in the ADF Faces project. John is an active participant in the open source community, contributing to both the Apache MyFaces project. editor-in-chief of JSF Central (http://www.jsfcentral.com) and the author of JavaServer Faces in Action (Manning, 2005). He is also a member of the JSF 1.2 and JSP 2.1 expert groups and principal