8 Introduction to Facelets

The term Facelets refers to the view declaration language for JavaServer Faces technology. Facelets is a part of the JavaServer Faces specification and also the preferred presentation technology for building JavaServer Faces technology–based applications. JavaServer Pages (JSP) technology, previously used as the presentation technology for JavaServer Faces, does not support all the new features available in JavaServer Faces in the Java EE 7 platform. JSP technology is considered to be a deprecated presentation technology for JavaServer Faces.

The following topics are addressed here:

• What Is Facelets?

• The Lifecycle of a Facelets Application

• Developing a Simple Facelets Application: The guessnumber-jsf Example Application

• Using Facelets Templates

• Composite Components

• Web Resources

• Relocatable Resources

• Resource Library Contracts

• HTML5-Friendly Markup