Customer Reviews

Core JavaServer(TM) Faces (2nd Edition)

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Struts spread like wildfire in part due to the fact that it was simple. JSF is very ambitious and defies a very simple explanation followed by a bugle blast to commence hacking. Nevermind the history of designing circuits, in software, generally the complex APIs don't get a following until a great book ships (e.g. Petzold, Roman's book on EJB, etc.). This is that book for JSF, and it is just on time. I would also like to differ with the opinion about the book being awkward because it makes you do things by hand that will soon be automated. That is a small part of the book, and doing by hand those early things helps immensely to understand the bigger picture (e.g. custom components, web services, etc.).

The reasons this book deserves a 5:

1. Its score for comprehensiveness alongside similar offerings is orders of magnitude higher.

2. Tool support for web dev is unfortunately still in its infancy for Java. The webtools project in eclipse just dropped its first version of a JSP editor for bloomin' sakes. That puts more pressure on the writers to have to painstakingly describe setup and configuration issues. They do an excellent job.

3. The examples are very good and get worked from different angles to great effect.

4. There are many useful diagrams as well, for example of the processing flow, which is crucial to understanding what the framework is doing for you. I had a case where I was debugging a problem and the error message looked spurious until I consulted the flow and saw that it was repopulating the page automatically.

JSF is not perfect, but this book shows that guidance can make all the difference in pain of adoption.

Core JavaServer Faces, by David Geary and Cay Horstmann, is a decent introduction to JavaServer Faces. But it's really just a "how-to" book: probably half the book is simply code listings, which are available online. Why waste the paper?

Once you get JSF installed into your servlet container, the book does an acceptable job of explaining how to perform most tasks. But it doesn't go into enough detail on the background behind JSF and comparisons to other technologies (raw JSPs, struts, etc.). It needs more "why", not just "how to".

If you want to know what to do, and why you should do it, read JavaServer Faces by Hans Bergsten (one of the Apache Tomcat developers, and contributor to JSP 2.0, JSTL, and JSF).

I am currently reading David Gearys Core JavaServer Faces book. I have read Chapters 1-9 and Chapter 12 (Ch 10 talks about JSF/ external service, Ch 11 about JSF/wireless clients).

One thing that annoyed me right away was he starts talking about the core JSF classes (UIInput, FacesContext etc) in early chapters without a formal introduction to the JSF class hierarchy. He does do a good job in laying out the JSF and HTML tags, but he never does the same for the classes. Well, I think that maybe the class hierarchy will come soon, but as I finished chapter 9 (custom components), I realized he never did that. As a programmer, I feel that this is a serious lacking in a book.Again, as a programmer, I managed to overcome this lacking by referring to the JSF Javadocs for the class hierarchy as I was reading thru the chapters. David Geary's own article on JSF does a good job of introducing the classes (although the names are a little outdated).

His examples are very good (the downloaded code builds/works great), but I did not find any that "pushed the envelope" of JSF. For example, in the custom components chapter, he talks about building a custom spinner :roll:; yes, this is a good intro to howto, but I would like to see something more complicated and exciting, like a tree or a list component. After all, the ability to plugin custom components as tags is one of the enticing features of the JSF specification. It would have also been nice if he had talked more about JavaScript/JSF interaction.

The book is about 600+ pages long, but I think half the pages are just code printed (a lot of the code is also repeated in the discussion within the chapters). I dont know if this is good (lot of printed code) or bad (lot of wasted trees). The longer chapters kind of meander between discussion of code and printed code, and by the time I was with the chapter, I had to go back and put the pieces together myself. It would have been nice if he summarized the concepts in the end. (I plan to summarize the `Custom Components' chapter soon)

I did find the chapter on Tiles and the `How do I' section on using the Commons Validator for client-side validation, quite interesting and informative :cool: (although, I think he should have delved more into these topics instead of a whole chapter on the JSF dataTable tag!)

Bottomline, Core JSF is a good introduction to JSF with some advanced discussion too. I recommend it to get started on JSF, but with a healthy dose of JSF JavaDocs and/or another book.

read the full review here ( http://www.browngeek.com/index.php?p=27 )

Great book on JSF, the absolute best intro to JSF in the concise, terse, classical style of Horstmann & Geary. You can buy any book by these two dudes with your eyes shut. I would have loved to see more new material in this second edition, especially on Seam and EJB integration in general. The book being so similar to the first edition there is little need for you to buy it if you already own the previous one.
The chapter on custom JSF tag development will be well over your head if you are reading the book as a first intro to JSF, and the LDAP material is pretty brutal and useless for a newbie to the subject, the chapter on opens source miscellanous frameworks is way too sparse to be useful beyond a little inspiration to learn more, but the rest of the book is top notch and will greatly help you to understand the JSF framework deep down to the bone.
The monkey wrenching title is not really about the book but about my feelings towards the development of java web development (forgive the horrible pun). First there were servlets, then JSP then EJB then Struts then JSF then Seam then Facelets then Shale...Am I the only one who feels that stacking framework over framework is going definitely overboard and leading us to do "frankenstein programming"? (omg I think I am starting to blog.. pls stop me! ;)

Over the last few months I have read four different books on Java Server Faces (JSF) and been through the Sun JSF - J2EE Tutorial. If you are going to start a new project using JSF and have a budget for just two books on the topic, I'd recommend that you buy two copies for Geary's book. One copy for your reference and one to loan out to the rest of the staff.

This book starts simple and builds and builds until you have a complete picture of JSF. The 600+ pages talk about everything from building web applications to using JSF with wireless devices. This is definitely the one to buy.

Hale Ed.D.

This is the best book on JSF on the market today: (1) Authors are experts. (2) Tells you how to use the technology, not just how it was designed. (3) Doesn't require prior experience with JSP, servlets. (4) No pages wasted on reference material that is available online. Highly recommended!

Core JavaServer Faces in an introduction to JSF for experienced Java programmers. The beginning of the book explains that JSF is designed to support GUI development using visual tools and the hand coding as shown in the book will eventually go away. JSF includes an event model and server components sort of like Swing for web applications. One important feature of JSF is that JSF tags represent a component and rendered that generate HTML, which makes it easier to use a different display technology. The book begins with an explaining of managed beans, which are important in separating business logic from presentation, and then proceeds to show each part of JSF, event handling, validation, etc.

The examples in the book are well written and complete. The example code also demonstrates good coding practices, such as using message bundles, which are beyond using JSF. The book also explains how to build complete JSF applications, explaining complex user interface layouts and connecting with back end databases. The last chapter "How do I..." answered many questions you would want answered or wouldn't have thought of to ask.

This book starts with the basics of JSF and build to show the entire framework and a lot of advance features. This is an outstanding book on learning and using JSF and I would definitely recommend this book.

[A review of the 2ND EDITION published in 2007.]

Respected Java authors Geary and Horstmann provide an update of the first edition of their book. The key theme is a faster and more robust coding of web servers using Java. From about 8 years ago, Java Server Pages and Java servlets were the recommended approach. But while doable, it proved quite grungy, with lots of low level code needed. Plus, Microsoft cranked up the competitive pressure with their .NET approach, that had a nice IDE. The collective response by Sun is given here, with JSF 1.2.

The book's code examples demonstrate a tight integration with XML configuration files. These files can encode things like navigation rules and action attributes. A file can be considered to define a server's state. Some files are lengthy. But the good thing is that you rarely have to edit these by hand. In the first edition of this book, much remained to be done, to improve the IDE. This second edition reveals impressive improvement.

The standard JSF tags are shown to lead to the building of sophisticated dynamic HTML pages. Much simpler than explicit coding of JSPs. Another bonus for the programmer is the existence of a comprehensive set of standard validators. These let you check user inputs and filter out invalid choices, before they get into your backend database.

Important recent topics like using Ajax or implementing a Web Service are also treated. Ajax and JSF are entirely compatible. This combination of improved client side abilities and server side functionality is easy to understand, from the text's examples. Some readers might wish for a lengthier discussion. Only 1 chapter is devoted to this. The treatment of Ajax itself is necessarily brief, as this is primarily a book on JSF, not Ajax. But there's enough to get you started.

This is the official book by Sun Microsystems Press. I found it easy to read and very informative. The first part requires little Java programming, having a gentle introduction into beans, navigation, standard components and validators. This should get anyone up to speed right away. The later chapters have more meat for experts, custom validators and components, databases and web services (not strictly JSF but still great to see how the pieces fit together) and finally a "how do I" chapter that's filled with nuggets. Much better than the Orielly book.

"Core JavaServer Faces" introduces JSF to programmers only requiring HTML and Java knowledge. The first chapter explains how to setup the examples using Tomcat and Ant. The authors show everything needed to run all the examples, including the directory structure.

Most of the book is also appropriate for experienced web developers. The second half has involved topics. The authors include a few comparisons to Struts and comment on how to combine the two frameworks. The authors keep most of the technical/advanced concepts at the end of the chapters and mark them clearly.

The first half of the book explains JSF. It includes everything you should know to use a framework, such as lifecycle and tags. The second half of the book shows how to use JSF with longer examples. This includes Tiles, custom components, JDBC and LDAP. There is even a chapter of wireless devices and combining JSF with MIDP. The last chapter is 25 "How do I ___" questions, like those at JavaRanch.

The book highlights best practices where possible. It uses some, such as style sheets and message bundles, through the examples. It even mentions cross-site scripting attacks and how JSF can assist in preventing them.

I had a copy of the first edition first printing. There were some minor typos and a missing reference, but the authors promise this will be corrected in the next printing. The reference is also on the book's website. Overall, I would definitely recommend this book.