JSP was great in its time. It revolutionized the way developers generated dynamic content on the web. But as with everything, time passed and other technologies were developed that made it even easier to generate this same kind of content, and on top of that, overcame many of the limitations that were introduced with JSP.

Enter JSF. It brings a graphical development mentality, similar to Swing's, which relies on a set of reusable UI components and event-driven approach. Instead of totally breaking away from its roots, JSF 2.0 can also be developed in the same way JSP is; in fact, a JSF application is a JSP/servlets application. Typically, Web Applications are developed using the MVC design pattern. This pattern works great with JSF since, in a typical JSF application, the View is the page we write, the Model is the data we wish to show, and the Controller is the FacesServlet. Every request passes through the FacesServlet. The configuration file for the FacesServlet is faces-config.xml.

If you wish to learn more about JSF, visit:

http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=314

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javaee/download-139288.html

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javaee/javaserverfaces-139869.html

How to do it...

Navigate to the Projects window:

1. Right-click on the projects name, in our case FirstJavaEE6Application, and select Properties.
2. On the Project Properties dialog, select Frameworks, and on Used Frameworks, click on Add....
3. Under Add a Framework dialog, select JavaServer Faces, and click OK.
4. Leave all the default values under Libraries and Configuration unchanged.
5. Click OK.