Ajaxian Faces

JavaServer Faces is a perfect platform for implementing Web 2.0 interfaces with Ajax. This session explores how you can use these two potent technologies–JSF and Ajax–together to create applications that look and behave like desktop applications but run in the browser.

JavaServer Faces, with a mature component model and flexible lifecyle, is a perfect platform for implementing Web 2.0 user interfaces with Ajax. This session explores using JSF and Ajax to create applications that act like desktop applications but run in a browser.

We'll start with a quick look at implementing basic Ajax in a JSF application. Then, once your bloodthirst has been slaked, we'll dive deeper into Ajaxian Faces dynamics with a form completion demo that requires its implementor to understand two simple, but vital facts about JSF.

If you're savvy, you probably use client-side validation to augment your server side validation logic, which parenthetically, is no no-brainer in either of the leading web application frameworks, JSF or Rails. But anyway, client-side validation is old school. All the cool developers nowadays use Ajax to implement realtime validation, where you sneak a trip to the server as an unwary user types into your input fields. But to accomplish that, we'll have to dive even deeper into JSF, with concerns such as accessing view state and accounting for client-side state saving.

All of this Ajax development is great fun, but most of it is best relegated to components and frameworks, which are the topics that will wrap up our session. We'll see how to keep your JavaScript separate from your JSF components and how to pass JSP tag attributes all the way through to JavaScript. Finally, we'll take a look at Ajax4jsf, a JSF component library with a tag library that blends Ajax into JSF in a natural, intuitive way without having to write JavaScript.

As web developers, we've been handcuffed long enough by the shackles of Web 1.0 development. Come to this session and see the brave new world of Web 2.0 development with one of the hottest web application frameworks.

About David Geary

David Geary is the president of Clarity Training, Inc. (corewebdevelopment.com), where he teaches developers to implement web applications using JavaServer Faces (JSF) and the Google Web Toolkit (GWT).

A prominent author, speaker, and consultant, David holds a unique qualification as a Java expert: He wrote the best-selling books on both Java component frameworks: Swing and JavaServer Faces. David's Graphic Java Swing was the best-selling Swing book, and is one of the best-selling Java books of all-time, and Core JSF, which David wrote with Cay Horstman, is the best-selling book on JavaServer Faces.

David was one of a handful of experts on the JSF 1.0 Expert Group (EG) that actively defined the standard Java-based web application framework, and David is currently on the JSF 2 Expert Group, helping to vastly improve JSF in version 2.

Besides serving on the JSF and JSTL Expert Groups, David has contributed to open-source projects and he has written questions for two of Sun's Certification Exams: Web Developer Certification and JavaServer Faces Certification. He invented the Struts Template library which was the precursor to Tiles, a popular framework for composing web pages from JSP fragments, was the 2nd Struts committer and contributed to the Apache Shale project.

David has spoken at more than 100 NFJS symposiums since 2003, and he also speaks at other conferences such as TheServerSide Java Symposium, JavaOne, JavaPolis, and JAOO. David has taught at Java University for the past three years, and is a three-time JavaOne rock star.

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