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In this beginner's JSF tuorial

section 1.1 says:

JSF UI components and their state are represented on the server with a defined life-cycle of the UI components.

But in the example that follows, I am unable to see how the state of an UI component is managed by the server? The example looks like a standard servlet jsp example minus the servlet mappings.

My other question is that in the example, we are accessing the jsp directly. Is this the standard thing to do in JSF as opposed to using servlet mappings?

Victor
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1 Answers1

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First of all, if you're a beginner, I encourage you not to look at that old tutorials and find a good JSF 2.x one. JSF 2 was released in 2009 and you should consider it as the branch to learn, as it brings several advantages comparing with 1.x old versions.

JSF has its own lifecycle for any request you make from the browser which can be a GET or POST request, even an ajax based one. What you basically have to understand about JSF comparing with other frameworks is that it's stateful. In other words, you can keep a component's state from one request to another (you actually have a view state, which can be kept no matter how many requests you do, until you change the view).

Appart from that, about your last statement, in old JSF ages the servlet mapping used to be done over .*jsf suffix. It means, when you make a request for that in the browser, jsf will convert the matching jsp page and display it.

JSF 2 however introduced facelets, which are based in .xhtml view pages. It's now also possible to do the mapping as .xhtml having the source code in an .xhtml too and JSF will make the conversion. The main advantage for this is that end user will not be allowed to see the sources, as browser's request matches source page's url, so JSF servlet will always be invoked.

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Aritz
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