JavaServer Faces 2.0, The Complete Reference [ペーパーバック]

Having reached past page 100 of the book, I feel compelled to pause for a moment and offer my review of it. If my opinion changes somewhat later, I'll update it in consequence.

Obviously, this book was hastily published, in an attempt to be the first one out, and is sorely lacking proofreading and coordination between the authors. Following are a few issues I personally found grating.

The text is adequate but verbose (some topics are needlessly broached several times) and all over the place (topics are started in a chapter, continued in another, and neither chapter provides a comprehensive picture of the functionality they're dealing with). Depth is inconsistent: Chapter 3, which is entirely devoted to explaining the request processing lifecycle, glosses over how navigating between different pages interacts with the lifecyle of those pages but at the same time Chapter 2 feels necessary to explain that you should use 'localhost' in your browser to point to a locally deployed application.

Some sections are directly lifted from the previous edition: I suppose there are no differences between the Expression Language in version 1.2 and version 2.0, but I'd like at least an acknowledgment instead of a diagram that only shows JSF versions reaching 1.2. Another example is that, suddenly, the text makes reference to JSP as the view definition language, and you find yourself wondering whether that section you're reading is still relevant in a Facelets world.

Even better (well, worse) is to see an "Expert Group Insight" box praising the MethodBinding class, without even making a note that the class is now deprecated (as a matter of fact, MethodBinding was *already* deprecated in JSF 1.2); if I tell you that the surrounding text makes no mention of that class, since MethodExpression has long replaced its functionality, you can see how those recurring little things can be annoying.

The examples are both repetitive and mostly useless. Some examples don't even match the text that refers to them (the command button action and value attribute values are repeat offenders there)

At times, the book feels like it was published without the authors' approval: Chapter 4, in its 10-page glory, is woefully insufficient as a coverage of the Facelets language (the non-templating Facelets tags have 1/2 page to share between them), and Chapter 17 (referred to in Chapter 2 and Chapter 5), while minor, is completely missing (and admitting that omission is sadly the only thing in the online errata at the moment)

Verdict

What I really expected from this book, was both a complete, integrated picture of JSF 2.0, and a sense of the best practices to use when developing a JSF application, but sadly this is not the book for it. At the very least, wait for a revised edition, so that they can fix the most glaring mistakes. But I'd still look somewhere else if I had to pick a JSF book again in a year.

I was attracted by the statements on the cover of this book.
But the content I found is equal to online Java EE tutorial + JSF 2.0 specification.

There are a lot of new features in JSF 2.0 and the authors introduce them well, but often without context. I mean I want to see a real problem that is easily and nicely can be solved by using the feature, what I see instead is just a synthetic "hello world" examples. This is one of the reasons why new comers programmers write inconsistent code: they use wrong tools in a wrong places.

There are not so many real examples as the book claims it has. There are no custom components created and just composite ones. I mean there are no Calendar component, fancy button component, accordions, etc. Without those components it is hard to call a site "RIA".
And as I understand JSF 2.0 is for Rich Internet Applications.
The "Virtual Trainer Application" sample (which is the only one complete and real) does not show the Full power of JSF 2.0. I mean I can implement the same application by using JSP 2.1 or with Struts 2.0, or with SpringMVC -- any MVC capable framework can do the same job with almost the same effort. So why should I use JSF? Ok, there is Validation which is greatly highlighted, but I wanted to see more.

Authors constantly says that we should not use that technique or this code in the real world example. Look, why I then bought this book?
For simplicity authors remove some JEE aspects, like EJB, but what they do instead is create their own things which kind of replace for EJB. They shows the real code and asks not to use it. What is the reason then? I am sure junior programmers won't check EJB and just will use the code authors provide.

After reading this book I still can't answer the questions I was interested in.
Some of them are:
what is the JSF 2.0 way to expose, let say, JQueryUI controls as JSF components?
how to create table component which will load data lazily?
how to implement two version of the page one for Computer's Browser and one for Mobile's one?

And there is no word about CDI (Context & Dependency Injection) + JSF 2.0 integration.

I am fortunate to have prior experience using JSF but I assume this book is going to be very hard to follow for developers new to this topic. And it is very verbose and still lacking for developers that have already used older versions of JSF. The chapter on Facelets is a joke. I haven't completed the book yet though. So far it has been a disappointment. It is a very incomplete reference.