Chapter 4. JSF Tools

JSF Tools is a set of tools designed for improving the development process of JSF projects. In this chapter, we will see that these tools offer amazing skills for creating different kinds of JSF projects and JSF components, such as converters, validators, managed beans, referenced beans, and so on. Also, we will talk about integrating JSF and the Facelets framework, and how to add/remove JSF support for an existing project.

Throughout this chapter, we will follow the "learning by example" technique, and we will develop a completely functional JSF application that will represent a JSF registration form as you can see in the following screenshot. These kinds of forms can be seen on many sites, so it will be very useful to know how to develop them with JSF Tools.

The example consists of a simple JSP page, named register.jsp, containing a JSF form with four fields (these fields will be mapped into a managed bean), as follows:

The information provided by the user will be properly converted and validated using JSF capabilities. Afterwards, the information will be displayed on a second JSP page, named success.jsp.