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Facelets 118
Facelets
Stable release 1.1.15 / November 24, 2009
Preview release 1.2-dev / November 10, 2006
Written in Java
Operating
system
Cross-platform
Size 5.07 MB (archived)
Type Web Framework
License Apache License 2.0
Website http:/ / facelets. dev. java. net/
Facelets is an open source web framework under the Apache license and the default view handler technology (aka
view declaration language) for JavaServer Faces (JSF). The framework requires valid input XML documents to
work. Facelets supports all of the JSF UI components and focuses completely on building the JSF component tree,
reflecting the view for a JSF application.
Although both JSP and JSF technologies have been improved to work better together, Facelets eliminates the issues
noted in Hans Bergsten's article "Improving JSF by Dumping JSP" [1]
Facelets is similar enough to Apache Tapestry to draw comparison. In fact, Tapestry was well ahead of its time when
it first came out , and Facelets does draw on some of its ideas. The project is conceptually similar to Tapestry's,
which uses the jwcid attribute, while Facelets uses the jsfc attribute combined with proper namespaces to convert
HTML elements into the corresponding JSF components. Also, there are some similarities to the Tiles framework
regarding support templating as well as composition.
Initially, Facelets was available as a separate, alternative view declaration language for JSF 1.1 and JSF 1.2 which
both used JSP as the default view declaration language. Starting from JSF 2.0, Facelets has been promoted as the
default, and JSP has been deprecated as a legacy fall back [2] .
Example
The following example shows an XHTML template for taking the use of Facelets component-aliasing. The jsfc
attribute is used here, shows which tags to replace when compiling the page with the corresponding JavaServer
Faces components.