JavaServer Faces (JSF) is a great server side Java technology in the field of web application development. JSF is developed by Sun Microsystems.

It provides the event-driven, component-based technology and simplifies building user interfaces for java server application. The JSF specification defines a set of standard UI components and provides an Application Programming Interface (API) for developing components and extensions of the existing standard UI components.

Why JSF?

Let us first analyze why JSF is so hot these days. There are reasons for development of new framework inspite of many already existing technologies like JSP, Servlets, Structs, etc. There are some problems faced while developing the complex web based application in JSP or Servlets. The reasons are:

Tedious and repetitive coding - Previous technologies like JSP make the programmer do a lot of tedious and repetitive coding.

Directly working with HTTP request and response - Using these technologies, programmers directly work with HTTP request and response objects and manipulate the data. But by using JSF and its components, Actionlistener tags and event handler components can easily handle request responses and validations are mostly done on the client side. For example, if the user submits the registration form then the programmer writes the code to get the values of each element in the form into a variable for further processing. When there is a need to retrieve the data from the database and show on the form for editing, then in this case the programmer writes the code to retrieve the code from the database and then set the values in the forms.

Non availability of IDE - Non availability of IDE is another major drawback which affects the programmers' productivity and also the development cost of the project increases.