Jim Cook

JavaServer Faces has established itself as the leading framework for JEE development. In spite of its rising popularity, many development teams are unfamiliar with its use of components: so let's begin with a description of JSF components and what they have to offer. At its most basic, a component begins as a new tag, sometimes called a "custom tag" that you can add to a JavaServer Page (JSP). When the JSP is compiled, the tag is converted to a more complicated HTML-base structure. For example a simple tag like might be converted to an entire HTML form to look up someone's e-mail, maybe something like: