Framework Roles

Because of the division of labor enabled by the JavaServer Faces technology design, JavaServer Faces application development and maintenance can proceed quickly and easily. In many teams, individual developers play more than one of these roles; however, it is still useful to consider JavaServer Faces technology from a variety of perspectives based on primary responsibility. The members of a typical development team are as follows:

Page authors, who use a markup language, such as HTML, to author pages for Web applications and usually have experience with graphic design. When using the JavaServer Faces technology framework, page authors are the primary users of the custom tag libraries included with JavaServer Faces technology.

Application developers, who program the objects, the event handlers, and the validators. Application developers can also provide the extra helper classes.

Component writers, who have user interface programming experience and prefer to create custom UI components using a programming language. These people can create their own components directly from the UI component classes, or they can extend the standard components provided by JavaServer Faces technology.

Application architects, who design Web applications, ensure their scalability, define page navigation, configure beans, and register objects with the application.

Tools vendors, who provide tools (such as the Sun Java Studio Creator application development tool) that leverage JavaServer Faces technology to make building server-side user interfaces even easier.

The primary users of JavaServer Faces technology are page authors, application developers, and application architects. The next section walks through a simple application, explaining which piece of the application is developed by the page author, application developer, and application architect.