JSF2 Facelet Tag Handlers

The following topics and more will be covered in detail in my upcoming book with Neil Griffin, JavaServer Faces 2.0: The Complete Reference. Please enjoy this early access content! One challenging aspect of designing JSF 2.0 was how to standardize Facelets. We wanted to standardize only the minimum amount that would still allow developers get the job done. Initially, we did not include binary custom tag handlers in the standard because most users of Facelets were simply using it to declare pages of existing UI components. Andy Schwartz and others advocated for the inclusion of a custom tag handler feature in the standard but I didn't want to just standardize what Jacob had initially done. While Jacob's initial work for custom tag handlers was certainly effective, EG discussions with Ken Paulsen, creator of the JSFTemplating View Declaration Language led the EG to conclude that the standardization work for some of Facelets would best be left to JSF 2.1. In particular, Ken and EG member Imre Oßwald came up with something they called View Abstract Syntax Tree that would handle deeper aspects of Faces templating that they felt solved some of the flaws in the implementation of Facelets. Rather than overspecify, we came up with a simpler solution that still enables the most common usecases for custom tag handlers. First, let's take a look at the custom.taglib.xml file. The manner and location for this file i...

Date: October, 15 2009
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/edburns/archive/2009/10/15/jsf2-facelet-tag-handlers

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