Facelets

Abstract

In the early days of web development, web pages consisted of many HTML tables for structuring layout and lots of redundancy across application pages. This made development of web pages cumbersome and difficult to maintain at best. Over the years, other technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) have come along to help web developers organize and style their pages. Such technologies encouraged organization by allowing developers to encapsulate styles into separate files, leaving the markup within pages easier to follow. Other technologies such as Tiles came along to help reduce the amount of redundancy that was incurred by providing a similar layout to all pages of an application. Tiles allowed developers to construct a single layout and apply it to several different web pages. Facelets is a view definition language that was introduced to help organize JSF views. Facelets follows in the footsteps of Tiles, in that it allows developers to encapsulate layouts into separate files and apply them to different JSF views…and that functionality only scratches the surface! While Facelets can be used to create layouts and build templates for JSF applications, it also brings with it many other significant advantages.