The J2EE™ Tutorial Second Edition

Creating the Component Tag Handler

If you've created your own JSP custom tags before, creating a component tag and tag handler should be easy for you.

In JavaServer Faces applications, the tag handler class associated with a component drives the render response phase of the JavaServer Faces life cycle. For more information on the JavaServer Faces life cycle, see The Life Cycle of a JavaServer Faces Page (page 662).

The first thing that the tag handler does is to retrieve the type of the component associated with the tag. Next, it sets the component's attributes to the values given in the page. Finally, it returns the type of the renderer (if there is one) to the JavaServer Faces implementation so that the component's encoding can be performed ...