Praeda & Co.

As Eray mentioned, JSF has lots of implementations from different companies. But, I preferred not to search through them. Instead, I tried to figure out best way to develop a JSF application using Netbeans.

At Netbeans official site, there are lots of tutorials about developing a visual JSF application. These tutorials are based on Project Woodstock. Since this implementation is tightly coupled with both Netbeans and Glassfish, and since there are tutorials, I think it will be best to use this built-in approach.

There is a quite good tutorial about Getting Started with Visual Web JSF Application Development at here. I suggest all team members to spent at least 4 hours at this tutorial looking through it in detail and trying it at a Netbeans project. Don’t skip the parts that seems easy, since there are lots of tips about using Netbeans at this tutorial.

In a simple login page, mainly we should create and configure three parts. First “login.jsp” for visual design and calling validating function. Second “login Bean”( Simple Java Class) for getting information from jsp page and creating this bean instance and also this java file includes the validation function. Third, “faces-config.xml” file for managing bean and redirecting the client according to the result of the validate function.

Then how should we check the logged-in status of the clients? One way is the check the attribute of a session object. Another way, which is proper to JSF, is to use “PhaseListener”.

How about session objects? Session Objects live on the server and are automatically associated with clients. Session objects are not travelled along networks only unique identifiers are used. “request.getSession” is enough to get the session object, we do not need to use our own cookies and hash tables, url-rewriting or hidden form fields.

Since JSF has lots of implementations from different companies or communities, it is hard to choose a specific one for using in a project. However, the website below is a very useful resource for benchmarking. It compares features of the JSF implementations in terms of components they have and AJAX support etc.

http://www.jsfmatrix.net/