Behind the Scenes

Now that you have read about the “what” and the “why” of JSF, you may be curious about just how the JSF implementation does its job.

Let us look behind the scenes of our sample application. We start at the point when the browser first connects to http://localhost:8080/login/faces/index.xhtml. The JSF implementation initializes the JSF code and reads the index.xhtml page. That page contains tags, such as h:form and h:inputText. Each tag has an associated tag handler class. When the page is read, the tag handlers are executed. The JSF tag handlers collaborate with each other to build a component tree (see Figure 1–12).