What is this all about? (Motivation)

If you’ve ever dug deeper into developing web applications with JSF or have developed Java web applications in the past using other frameworks and libraries, e.g. Turbine, Velocity, Struts, etc., you will soon find that JSF itself has a a nice concept but provides only the most basic functionality.

In JSF itself you have a strict seperation of concerns and a nicely split MVC architecture, but for a fully fledged application that uses persistent data, pluggable components and a templating system, JSF on its own just isn’t enough.

You could now start creating a new Java 5 EE application, building several components (JPA, EJB, etc.), bundle them into an EAR file and deploy them to the Glassfish application server. But we won’t. Don’t misunderstand me: there’s nothing wrong with writing a full Java Enterprise application and I salute to those who do, but for most developers such a setup is just overkill (whereas a simple Servlet is not enough). But this series is about lightweight applications. Please note that “weightâ?? is not measured in bytes but in the amount of stuff you have to write to get things done.

This series describes a different approach to Java web applications and is inspired by the facesgoodies project developed by Matthias Wessendorf. This project is a kickstart project for developing JSF applications including Spring and Shale using the JPA persistence layer. Unfortunately it is not document very well and somewhat hard to understand for those who have never used Spring or configured a more complex web application or a persistence unit.

This series/tutorial is designed to help you design next generation web applications using modern, community supported technologies.

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