While most existing JSF books focus on teaching readers how to use the Faces framework, this book instead looks specifically at Facelets and the component libraries within the Apache MyFaces project, viz. Tomahawk, Trinidad, Orchestra, and Tobago.

After spending a weekend with this book, here are my impressions:

* The book is fairly short, and so seems very diminutive when stacked up against other books on JSF. You can imagine reading this from cover to cover over a long weekend.

* With four main authors, and six contributing authors, this book reads like a series of articles on JSF. Fortunately, the articles are well written for the most part, and you can read the chapters out of order without loss of continuity.


MyFaces Core:
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The chapter on MyFaces Core (the actual JSF implementation) is only about 20 pages long. So while it works as a decent refresher, it is absolutely not a first introduction to JSF. I suspect newcomers to JSF will find this book rather daunting unless they've already read some of the other excellent books on Faces (see my review for Kito Mann's JSF in Action.)

Tomahawk:
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This chapter is very well written and focuses on some important components (like tree2, schedule, inputCalendar, etc.) The explanations are clear enough to make you feel you should be able to get these working after a reading. However, I was disappointed to find marginal treatment of the t:saveState component - especially as there are multiple references to it in other chapters (as in the discussion of Orchestra, and in JSF pitfalls).
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As an aside, this book's index is the gold standard for tech books - about 30 pages for a 285 page book. When I went looking for saveState, for example, I was able to quickly zero in on all its references.
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Facelets:
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I got a strange sense of deja vu when I read the chapter on Facelets - turns out it is lifted almost verbatim from APress's Facelets Essentials - along with the surreal Bird Store example. If you have read that book, you won't find many surprises here. This chapter and its Facelets appendix take up 58 pages which turns out to be over two thirds of the content of that other book. Fortunately its the best two thirds - so you really get two books in one here.
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What really bothered me is that most of the examples in this book use JSP as the presentation technology. If Facelets is really worthy of having a mention on the title, I'd have expected to see more real world usage throughout the book.

So why not drink the KoolAid?
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Misc projects:
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A common problem I had with the other chapters was that the examples were too short to be of much use.

For instance, the example for pageFlowScope is too trivial to convincingly demonstrate why it is useful. It provides nothing more than a description of the mechanical aspects of using this scope. I'd have loved to see a working example that exemplified how it avoided the weaknesses of the request and session scopes.

[To fully grasp the actual meat of this particular topic, I highly recommend reading about Tomahawk's saveState, Trinidad's pageFlowScope, and Orchestra's conversation scope - all in one sitting. These are all different solutions to the same core issue - so they're best read together. The discussion in Orchestra's chapter is by far the best - esp. see Page 175 - Managing Independent Windows, and page 194 - Orchestra's Architecture.]


Antipatterns:
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The chapter on JSF Antipatterns is a very interesting read. A few of these antipatterns seem like spectacularly bad ideas to begin with and you wonder how they passed design reviews in the first place. However, there are a lot of practical usage tips here (such as thread safety issues with custom validators and converters) that made it worth my time.


Appendices:
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The information on dependency injection with Spring is confined to about a paragraph - so a better choice is Spring Recipes by Gary Mak. The appendix on view state encryption is also a useful addition.

Conclusion:
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This book was long overdue - and is well worth your time if you are into using the MyFaces sub-projects. Throw in Facelets and you have a winning combination.


Damodar Chetty
swengsol.com