Core JavaServer Faces (Core Series) [ペーパーバック]

Struts spread like wildfire in part due to the fact that it was simple. JSF is very ambitious and defies a very simple explanation followed by a bugle blast to commence hacking. Nevermind the history of designing circuits, in software, generally the complex APIs don't get a following until a great book ships (e.g. Petzold, Roman's book on EJB, etc.). This is that book for JSF, and it is just on time. I would also like to differ with the opinion about the book being awkward because it makes you do things by hand that will soon be automated. That is a small part of the book, and doing by hand those early things helps immensely to understand the bigger picture (e.g. custom components, web services, etc.).

The reasons this book deserves a 5:

1. Its score for comprehensiveness alongside similar offerings is orders of magnitude higher.

2. Tool support for web dev is unfortunately still in its infancy for Java. The webtools project in eclipse just dropped its first version of a JSP editor for bloomin' sakes. That puts more pressure on the writers to have to painstakingly describe setup and configuration issues. They do an excellent job.

3. The examples are very good and get worked from different angles to great effect.

4. There are many useful diagrams as well, for example of the processing flow, which is crucial to understanding what the framework is doing for you. I had a case where I was debugging a problem and the error message looked spurious until I consulted the flow and saw that it was repopulating the page automatically.

JSF is not perfect, but this book shows that guidance can make all the difference in pain of adoption.

I am currently reading David Gearys Core JavaServer Faces book. I have read Chapters 1-9 and Chapter 12 (Ch 10 talks about JSF/ external service, Ch 11 about JSF/wireless clients).

One thing that annoyed me right away was he starts talking about the core JSF classes (UIInput, FacesContext etc) in early chapters without a formal introduction to the JSF class hierarchy. He does do a good job in laying out the JSF and HTML tags, but he never does the same for the classes. Well, I think that maybe the class hierarchy will come soon, but as I finished chapter 9 (custom components), I realized he never did that. As a programmer, I feel that this is a serious lacking in a book.Again, as a programmer, I managed to overcome this lacking by referring to the JSF Javadocs for the class hierarchy as I was reading thru the chapters. David Geary's own article on JSF does a good job of introducing the classes (although the names are a little outdated).

His examples are very good (the downloaded code builds/works great), but I did not find any that "pushed the envelope" of JSF. For example, in the custom components chapter, he talks about building a custom spinner :roll:; yes, this is a good intro to howto, but I would like to see something more complicated and exciting, like a tree or a list component. After all, the ability to plugin custom components as tags is one of the enticing features of the JSF specification. It would have also been nice if he had talked more about JavaScript/JSF interaction.

The book is about 600+ pages long, but I think half the pages are just code printed (a lot of the code is also repeated in the discussion within the chapters). I dont know if this is good (lot of printed code) or bad (lot of wasted trees). The longer chapters kind of meander between discussion of code and printed code, and by the time I was with the chapter, I had to go back and put the pieces together myself. It would have been nice if he summarized the concepts in the end. (I plan to summarize the `Custom Components' chapter soon)

I did find the chapter on Tiles and the `How do I' section on using the Commons Validator for client-side validation, quite interesting and informative :cool: (although, I think he should have delved more into these topics instead of a whole chapter on the JSF dataTable tag!)

Bottomline, Core JSF is a good introduction to JSF with some advanced discussion too. I recommend it to get started on JSF, but with a healthy dose of JSF JavaDocs and/or another book.

read the full review here ( http://www.browngeek.com/index.php?p=27 )

Core JavaServer Faces, by David Geary and Cay Horstmann, is a decent introduction to JavaServer Faces. But it's really just a "how-to" book: probably half the book is simply code listings, which are available online. Why waste the paper?

Once you get JSF installed into your servlet container, the book does an acceptable job of explaining how to perform most tasks. But it doesn't go into enough detail on the background behind JSF and comparisons to other technologies (raw JSPs, struts, etc.). It needs more "why", not just "how to".

If you want to know what to do, and why you should do it, read JavaServer Faces by Hans Bergsten (one of the Apache Tomcat developers, and contributor to JSP 2.0, JSTL, and JSF).