Topic 18
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Spring Web Flow and JSF
In the previous chapter, we discussed developing web application with Spring MVC, using JSPX and
JavaScript as the view technologies.
In terms of web application development, there are numerous options, including native clients (for
example, Adobe Flex, JavaFX, Microsoft Silverlight, and so on), MVC frameworks (for example, Spring
MVC, JBoss Seam, Struts, and so on), and view technologies (for example, JSP, Velocity, JavaScript, JSF,
and so on).
Besides Spring MVC, Spring provides a project called Spring Web Flow
(www.springsource.org/webflow), which supports the development of flow-based web applications; it
also has tight integration with view technologies such as the Dojo Toolkit and JSF. Moreover, Spring Web
Flow tightly integrates with Spring MVC for supporting web application features such as i18n, theming,
and validation.
In this chapter, we will discuss how the Spring Web Flow project can help you develop a flow-based
web application. Moreover, we will demonstrate how Spring Web Flow works with JSF (a component-
based view technology, which is also the standard view technology within the JEE stack) using the Spring
Faces module (under Spring Web Flow) and PrimeFaces (http://primefaces.org), a popular JSF
component library. Specifically, this chapter will cover the following topics:
Spring Web Flow: We will introduce Spring Web Flow and the main features that it
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provides, including its support for developing flow-based application, its more
fine-grained scope of Java beans, and the view technologies that Spring Web Flow
integrates with.
JSF: We will present a high-level description of JSF (specifically, JSF 2). Its main
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concepts, including the component-based model, view-handling life cycle,
templating support, and so on, will be discussed. In addition, we will also briefly
describe some commonly used JSF component libraries.
Spring Web Flow and PrimeFaces: We will demonstrate how to use Spring Web
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Flow and PrimeFaces to develop a flow-based web application.
Project for Sample Backend
It's always better to develop a web application with a concrete backend, other than some simple "Hello
World" examples. As a result, a sample backend project was prepared in the sample source code so that
you can just import the project and the backend will be ready. We then can focus on frontend
development. In the following sections, we will briefly describe the sample backend and how to import
the project for developing the frontend samples in this chapter.
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