Chapter 3. Setting Up the JSF Environment

You need two things to run a JSF application: a Java web container and an implementation of the JSF specification.

There are plenty of Java web containers available, including commercial offerings, such as Caucho Technology’s Resin, the BEA WebLogic Server, the IBM WebSphere Application Server, and the Oracle Application Server, and open source products, such as the Apache Tomcat server, Mortbay’s Jetty server, and Gefion Software’s LiteWebServer. JSF requires a web container that implements at least the Servlet 2.3 and JSP 1.2 specifications (part of J2EE 1.3), but the examples in this book use some features introduced in JSP 2.0, so to run them as is, you need a web container that implements the Servlet 2.4 and JSP 2.0 specifications (part of J2EE 1.4). All examples have been tested with the open source Tomcat 5 server (on which the reference implementation for these specifications is based) and I recommend that you use it as you read this book and develop your own JSF applications.

JSF is such a new technology that as of this writing, there aren’t many implementations besides the reference implementation from Sun Microsystems available yet.[1] This will change during 2004, though, so when you read this, your favorite web container may bundle a JSF implementation. The web application containing all the book examples includes a version of the reference implementation, and I recommend that you use it. You can always download the latest version ...

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