Mastering JavaServer Faces

Rating:
Summary: A solid treatment of JSF technology...
Review: I recently got a chance to review Wiley's book Mastering JavaServer Faces by Bill Dudney, Jonathan Lehr, Bill Willis, and LeRoy Mattingly. Overall, this is a nice book if you're looking to get involved in JSF technology.

Chapter list: JSF Patterns and Architecture; Elements of JSF; JSF Request-Processing Life Cycle; JSF Configuration; JSP Integration in JSF; UI Components; Navigation, Actions, and Listeners; Validation and Conversion; Building JSF Applications; Custom JSF Components; Converting a Struts Application to JSF; What's on the Web Site; References; Index

This is primarily a learning tool for JSF with a fair amount of reference material thrown in. In chapters 4 through 8, you'll touch on each main area of JSF coding, and the authors provide a solid mix of learning and reference lists for your on-going use as you continue down the JSF path. They don't skimp on code listings, so you'll have some decent examples to draw upon as you start to build your own applications. They also use a variety of UML diagrams to show the flow of a JSF program and how the class structure is laid out. This is good in that you'll run into this type of notation in quite a few places, so you'll get a good understanding of it here.

The other thing I liked about this book was the "why" portion in the patterns and architecture section. Too often, a book that is teaching you a new technology will not cover a lot of best practices and patterns on how programs should be built using the new tool. By providing this type of information up front, the reader should be able to get into the right mindset and develop solid coding practices and concepts from the start.

Bottom line... a solid book with good information, and you should be happy with the result.

Rating:
Summary: Well written JSF tutorial
Review: JSF is a new technology designed to simplify the task of creating Java web applications by making them work more like typical GUI event driven applications. There are a lot of changes to the web framework for JSF and this book does a very good job of clearly explaining these changes. The book starts with an introduction to JSF that compares it to both Struts and Swing. The authors explain both the architecture and the main patterns used in JSF, which helps to make clear how JSF works. UML diagrams are used to help explain how the various pieces of JSF interact. The middle section of the book covers all the main points of JSF at a nice leisurely pace: configuration, UI components, navigation, event handling, and data conversion and validation. Plenty of code samples are provided and all the code is clearly explained. The final section of the book covers building a complete JSF application, designing custom components, and converting an application from Struts to JSF.

This book is a nice introduction and tutorial on JSF. For many developers, this will be all they need. Others may be looking for a book that can serve as a reference or will cover more detail and this book will not fill that need. If you are looking for a book to help you learn the basics of JSF and to get a good understanding of how to properly implement a JSF application, then this book will serve you very well.


Rating:
Summary: "timely.practical.reliable"
Review: This book is written in a very mature language, is upto the point, very articulate, and clear. The diagrams are refreshingly clear too.

It begins with a nice study of the three UI frameworks Struts,Swing and JSF, and how JSF is closer to Struts.

Then provides a detailed account of the component based architecture of JSF, the various elements of JSF such as UI components,Validation,Events,Listeners,Renderers etc. Request-Processing lifecycle, and JSF configuration.

There is a chapter on builidng JSF application with examples, a chapter on building Custom JSF components.

Also covered in depth is the issue of converting from Struts to JSF.

JSF is here to stay, and this books gets you started on time.

As Wiley says, this book definitely is timely,practical and reliable.

Rating:
Summary: The Best JSF Book I've Read Yet
Review: This is the best JSF book I've read to date. To begin with, its an excellent value. There is no wasted space. The O'Reilly book has 242 pages of appendix which basically regurgitates the API (shame!) You won't find that here. Also, the authors do not waste your time explaining what a JSP page is, etc.

The book starts off with an overview of MVC but it goes beyond explaining what MVC is (which is where most books stop) but explains how MVC is used in Swing and Struts and compares that to how it is employed in JSF. It also goes into some of the rationale for why things in JSF were designed the way they were. If you're not into that - fine, but at least its not an explanation of how to deploy a Servlet.

This book provides the most thorough explanation of how things work in JSF and provides impressive coverage of the lifecylce. These are the things you are going to have to know once you finish your "Hello World" programs and need to start actually writing a program.

I've read the Core and O'Reilly books so far. I'd have to rate this one the best. Perhaps my impressions were affected by the fact that I read these books first, but I feel like the reader will learn more from this book. It doesn't waste your time writing "Hello Faces" examples in chapter one just to appease the reader. You won't get down and dirty with the code to the middle of the book but that is how it should be in my opinion.

Also, if you are a Struts programmer, this book is much better than the others in discussing Struts and how it compares. It also provides some detail about integrating the two etc. Not as much as I would have liked, but much much more than the other books.