I’m pleased to announce the fourth podcast in JSFCentral’s podcast series. This podcast is an interview with David Geary, author of Core JSF and the president of Clarity Training, Inc., where he teaches developers to implement web applications using JSF, GWT, and Grails. It was recorded in May of 2007 at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco, CA. Here’s an excerpt:
 

Kito: Okay, a lot of people that hear about JSF and maybe are working with it don’t really see how it meshes with Ajax. So if you’ve got these great JavaScript frameworks out there and you have a JSF application or are thinking about building one, how do these frameworks relate to actual JavaServer Faces development?

 
David: That’s a good question: how do you actually use these JavaScript frameworks if you are already using JSF? The answer really is that JSF is a great framework to integrate JavaScript frameworks. JSF has two things; it has a very well-defined life cycle, and it has the ability to create your own components and renderers. You can create your own components that wrap JavaScripts. In other words you can implement renderers – as you well know – that can generate JavaScripts and Ajax on the fly when they get processed in the page. Then you can add JSP tags or Facelet tags, if you prefer, on top of those components and renderers so the bottom line is that you can give page authors tags that are Ajax-enabled and they just put the tags in their pages. They don’t have to know anything about JavaScript or Ajax. They don’t even have to know what Ajax means, what it stands for. Just give them the tags and say “here’s my tags that represent Scriptaculous effects or Rico accordion components. Here’s the tags, here’s their attributes, just stick it in the page and use it.“ That encapsulation capability with components and renderers is a very compelling reason to merge JSF and Ajax together.

 
Check out the podcast here: David Geary Podcast. You can catch David Geary and other expert JSF speakers at JSFOne.