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Authoring JSF pages in pure Java

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JSF is well known as a server side web framework to build a web application's UI with the help of components. For the overwhelming majority of users those components are represented by the tags one uses to compose a page, be it via JSP or Facelets. The following is a typical example of a page authored with Facelets: <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html"> <h:body> #{backingBean.hello} <h:form> <h:inputText value="#{backingBean.name}" /> <h:commandButton value="Say Hello" action="#{backingBean.sayHello}" /> </h:form> </h:body> </html> This may give the impression that JSF components *are* the tags shown above, and thus that JSF is necessarily about tags and XML. That is however not true. JSF has always had a clear separation between th