What exactly is java server faces?

Question

In comparison with asp.net webforms and asp.net mvc frameworks.

Answer 1

JSF is a component based MVC framework. It runs on top of the Servlet API. You can use the JSF tags in the old fashioned JSP files or, more designed towards JSF, in Facelets XHTML files.

It has a full worthy lifecycle as presented in the image below:

Image is extracted from this page of the Java EE 7 tutorial. You can find a practical playground example in this article as well.

See also:

• What is the difference between JSF, Servlet and JSP?
• Picture/article which describes JSF lifecycle in detail
• What components are MVC in JSF MVC framework?

Answer 2

It's like ASP.Net webforms, where you use UI Components and event-bindings to build up your web pages.