Chapter 1. Introducing JavaServer Faces

Over the last few years, Java has established itself as the leading technology for web application development. Developers are using technologies like servlets and JSP to develop scalable and robust browser-based user interfaces for countless applications with great success. But as web applications become more complex, some developers are longing for the good ol' days of traditional graphical user interface (GUI) frameworks with rich, powerful user interface widgets and event-driven development models. Servlets and JSP have served us well, but HTTP's stateless nature and simple, coarse-grained request/response model forces application developers using these technologies to struggle with details that are handled behind the scenes by GUI frameworks like AWT/Swing, the standard GUI framework for Java.

To make it easier to develop sophisticated web application user interfaces, open source projects and commercial companies have developed frameworks that mimic traditional GUI frameworks as far as possible. Some notable examples are Enhydra's Barracuda, Apache's Tapestry, Oracle's UIX, and Sun's JATO. In the spring of 2001, a Java Community Process (JCP) group was formed with representatives from most of these efforts (including yours truly) to come up with a standard solution that all frameworks can use. The result is JavaServer Faces; the 1.0 version of the specification was released in March 2004.