AJAX and JavaServer™ Faces

Ajax Components

Ajax is cool, but implementing—and especially reimplementing and debugging—low-level Ajax code is not cool. To rid ourselves of that burden entirely, we now turn to JSF custom components, which happen to be an excellent vehicle for encapsulating Ajax code. Once our custom components are encapsulated, we can use them via JSP tags to create compelling user experiences.

Hybrid Components

It should be fairly obvious that the road to Ajax bliss can be paved by implementing custom renderers that emit JavaScript code.

Even more interesting, however, are JSF components that wrap existing JavaScript components. After all, why would you want to implement components such as accordions (à la Flash) or drag and drop, from scratch, when you ...