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The next talk I attended was presented by Kito Mann from Virtua and went over the new items that are expected in the next major release. JSF2.0 will be part of Java Enterprise Edition 6, and the official JSR is 314.

Kito has a professional grasp of all the new aspects of JavaServer Faces 2.0, and gave a great presentation with lots of detailed information. One of the things the community designing the spec had as their vision was to: Listen, Prioritize, and Implement. While the next major release of JSF won’t be final until sometime in June, it does help to silence a lot of the current problems that exist in JavaServer Faces.

Here are some of the highlights:

• Page Description Language (PDL) – The community members took a technology like Facelets that evolved out of the pain caused by the earlier JSP-only versions of JSF, and decided it better be in the next version. I’m still not convinced that the lengths to which JSF goes to shave this yak will prove worth it. A Facelet template looks as convoluted and disgustingly difficult to read as JSP, and looks more cryptic. At least JSP looks vaguely like HTML.
• New Scopes – They’ve added a View scope, a Flash scope, and a Conversation scope facilitated by using WebBeans (JSR299).
• Resource Handling
• AJAX Support
• Composite Components
• Navigation Rules

And with that, we find out what IBM^HSun and the community members have in store for us with JavaServer Faces 2.0. It’s a noble effort, and I know that it will be endlessly praised for the great leaps forward it has made. They’ve obviously taken a lot of great ideas from Facelets, Seam, and other efforts by the community to put lipstick on JavaServer Faces 1.x. LIke it or not, JavaServer Faces is “The Standard” and receives the lions share of vendor attention. If you’d like to actually enjoy coding the frontend though…

Be sure to check out our talk on Apache Wicket on Friday at 3pm in Breakout Room 1 – If you liked 5 Days of Wicket, you’ll love this in-depth hour and drop us a line if your company needs training in wicket: trainings@mysticcoders.com