Developing the User Interface Pages
With the Java classes defined and implemented in some form (maybe just prototypes initially), the page author can get to work.
The page author is the person who is responsible for developing the pages that make up the application’s user interface, typically as templates that interleave static content (text, graphics, tables for layout, and so on) with dynamically generated content. A page is represented by a set of UI component instances bound to the application’s data and methods. The static content and the dynamic content generated by the components is combined and sent to the browser. When the user clicks a link or a button in the page, the request is processed by the methods bound to the UI components. Depending on the outcome, the same page may be rendered again or the application may select a new page to send back to the user.
As I mentioned earlier, JSF can be combined with different presentation layer technologies, so the details of what the template looks like may vary depending on the options supported by the JSF implementation. For better or for worse, JSF 1.0 requires all implementations to support JSP as one of the possible presentation layer technologies. On one hand, JSP is familiar to many developers, so it lowers the barrier of entry to JSF. On the other hand, JSP has its own mechanism for adding dynamic content to a static template; when mixed with JSF UI components, there’s a risk for confusion and clashes between the two technologies. ...
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