JavaServer Faces (JSF) is a new and exciting technology coming out from Sun. It is a framework for creating user interfaces for web applications. JSF offers both a programming model and user interface (UI) component tag library for developing web applications. The UI is created on the server (through JSP / servlets) and renders back on the client as HTML (with embedded JavaScript). Both the JSF specification and Sun's JSF tutorial start off by discussing the JSF lifecycle and the component model that it works with internally. Instead this book will approach JSF by treating it as a technology for building JSP pages that create HTML and therefore this book begins by describing the JSF HTML tag library. Only much later in the book, when the reader is comfortable with JSF, do the details of the lifecycle and UI-Components and renderers get introduced.