Java Server Faces are a traditional way of building server-centric, component-based HTML UIs. Java EE 8 ships with the updated JSF version 2.3.
The main improvements of the version update include better CDI, WebSocket and AJAX integration, class-level Bean Validation, as well as support for Java SE 8.
Since the focus of this book is clearly on the backend-side, it doesn't include much about JSF.