Overview of JSF

Introduction

Hello and welcome, readers! We hope you are doing well.

Today, in this article, we will discuss the Overview of JavaServer Faces(JFS). 

In this article, you will learn about the basic overview of JavaServer Faces, like what JavaServer Faces is, where it is used, what are the benefits, what are the drawbacks, its different features etc. After completing this article, you will clearly understand the basic overview of JSF. So follow the article till the end.

Okay, without further ado, let’s jump into the article.

JSF(JavaServer Faces)

JavaServer Faces(JSF) is a server-side component-based, event-oriented web user interface framework for developing web applications. For server-based applications, It simplifies the construction of user interfaces(UI) using the reusable UI components in a page. The JSF(JavaServer Faces) is an XML document representing formal components in a logical tree. 

The JSF provides a wide range of standard UI components. It also has the flexibility to define and develop new components using the external Application Programming Interface(API). It also has tag libraries used to add components to the web pages. The JSF components are backed by Java objects. The JSF allows access to the server-side data and logic. 

Features of JSF

The JSF has standard features that make it powerful among the other web-based technologies available on Java. The latest version of the JSF Provides the following features as shown below:

• Component-Based Features
• Facelets Technology
• Integration with Expression Language
• Ease and Rapid Web Development
• Support Internationalisation
• Managed Beans
• HTML5
• Templating
• Exception Handling
• AJAX Support
   

If you want to learn more about JSF features, you can follow this article, Features of JSF.

Benefits of JSF

The benefits of the JSF(JavaServer Faces) are shown below:

• JSF reduces the effort of creating and maintaining applications.
• It offers a clean separation between behaviour and presentation.
• The architecture of JSF makes it easy for developers to use.
• It provides reusable UI components.
• It helps manage UI states among multiple server requests.
• It makes easy data transfer between UI components.
• Its event handling mechanism is very robust.
• It offers multiple, standardised vendor implementations.
• It enables the implementation of custom components.

Drawbacks of JSF

The drawbacks of the JSF are shown below:

• One of the main disadvantages of JSF is that the learning curve of JSF is steep.
• JSF or JavaServer Faces is not suitable for high-performance applications.
• As JSF uses session objects to store the state of the component, in a request, we can’t scale it.
• As in JSF, there is no tight coupling between the phase listener and the managed bean, the phase listener feature is unusable.