JavaServer Faces - JSF and Ajax

JSF and Ajax

JSF is often used together with Ajax, a Rich Internet application technology. Ajax is a combination of technologies that make it possible to create rich user interfaces. The user interface components in Mojarra (the JSF reference implementation) and Apache MyFaces were originally developed for HTML only, and Ajax had to be added via JavaScript. This has changed, however:

Because JSF supports multiple output formats, Ajax-enabled components can easily be added to enrich JSF-based user interfaces. The JSF 2.0 specification provides built in support for Ajax by standardizing the Ajax request lifecycle, and providing simple development interfaces to Ajax events, allowing any event triggered by the client to go through proper validation, conversion, and finally method invocation, before returning the result to the browser via an XML DOM update.

JSF 2 includes support for graceful degradation when JavaScript is disabled in the browser.