This session examines the ecosystem of products built on JavaServer Faces.

We start with a discussion of why JSF is significant and explain how it lays the foundation for a range of new products. We then look at the IDE offerings from major industry players, such as Sun, IBM, and Oracle. Next, we examine the products from smaller vendors and open source organizations, such as component suites and additional toolkits and frameworks, examining the specific features and benefits that these products provide. Finally, we look at other potential product opportunities and examine ways to get involved.

Over the past few years, a lot of time has been spent explaining what JSF is, and how different pieces of it work. However, little attention has been given to the process of architecting applications. This makes JSF architecture seem like a black art, since there are so many possible approaches to the application's architecture.

This session looks at different techniques for structuring JavaServer Faces (JSF) applications, and examines the consequences of each technique. In addition, we will examine extension points within JSF, and how they can be leveraged to provide features such as security, alternate templating technology, and access to external resources. The session ends with some additional tips and best practices.

The benefits of using JavaServer Faces UI components to rapidly construct complex, interactive user interfaces have become quite clear over the past couple of years. However, the standard process for developing these UI components is currently quite tedious. Fortunately, there are better solutions available.

This presentation examines techniques for easing the process of developing components with techniques such as annotations, convention over configuration, and templating. We'll examine solutions based on JSP tag files, Facelets, and Apache Shale. In addition, we will discuss how JSF 2 will simplify the process.

JBoss Seam is a popular open-source application framework for Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 5.0. For web application developers, a significant benefit of Seam is that it greatly enhances JavaServer Faces technology. This session explains key Seam features such as tight integration with EJB3, Hibernate and JPA integration, conversations, RESTful web pages, and so on.

This presentation introduces Seam web features from the perspective of a developer on the JavaServer Faces platform. It uses a lot of code examples and demonstrates live applications. It also discusses RAD tools for getting a Seam JavaServer Faces technology-based project started. Developers attending this presentation will leave with a basic understanding of exactly what Seam is, what problems it solves, and how to get started.