I’ve been looking around for JSF Tutorial resources and books to get up to speed with JSF. There are a number of articles on sites, but the majority are tied to wizard-based approaches in various IDEs – the problem with these is once you’ve clicked through the wizards and generated the code you realy are stilll none the wiser – what does the generated code do? (One of the most impressive wizards has to be the Netbeans 5.5 wizard – JSF Pages from Entities, which generates JSP pages and Controllers from EJB3.0 Entity beans, which can also be generated from a database schema – very impressive).
I know the point of JSF is that it is intended to be used in conjunction with an IDE to paint the components on your pages etc, but I like to have a deeper understanding of what is going on under the covers.
The best tutorial resource I’ve found so far is this tutorial on the Exadel site. Exadel have a fullfeatured Java IDE, but this tutorial can be followed without the need for using their (or any) IDE to generate any code. The article is in two parts – firstly it covers a brief into to JSF, then walks you through a simple 2 page JSF app, using Managed Beans. The second part of the app introduces validation in JSF. It’s a shame the tutorial does not go any further than this as it is very well written and easy to follow (without a lot of the fluff in some other tutorials).
I’ll be adding some additional resources here in the next couple of weeks.