Chapter 15. Developing a Custom Presentation Layer

The sample application used for the examples in the previous chapters is developed with the JSP custom tag libraries defined by JSF, but as I mentioned in Chapter 1, JSF allows you to plug in other presentation layer technologies besides JSP. In this chapter, I sketch out two alternatives: JSF views defined by pure Java code and JSF views defined in XML files tied to pure HTML templates. In a real application, the implementation of these alternative presentation layers must be fleshed out, but this chapter illustrates what's possible by plugging a few custom classes into the JSF framework.