JSFTemplating and Woodstock: Component Authoring Made Easy

Overview

In a recent paper, JSFTemplating was applied to writing JavaServer Faces components. That article presents a simple way to develop a JavaServer Faces component Renderer, moving the markup for a component from Java code to a template file and vastly improving the clarity and maintainability of the component. The approach discussed in that article is helpful, but it doesn't address many of the other pain points of JavaServer Faces component authoring. For example, one must still write a JavaServer Pages (JSP) tag handler, the JSP TLD file, the faces-config.xml file, and potentially the Facelets taglib.xml file. One must also find a way to package and serve resources associated with the component.