JavaServer Faces 2.3 Gets JCP Approval -- ADTmag

JavaServer Faces 2.3 Gets JCP Approval

By John K. Waters
March 8, 2017

The final results of the Public Review Ballot for JSR 372 are in, and the latest JavaServer Faces specification (JSF 2.3) has been approved. The public review started near the end of January, and members of the Executive Committee (EC) of the Java Community Process (JCP) announced their approval of the ballot results this week.

JSF is the Java spec for building component-based UI for Web applications, and it's part of the Java EE platform. JSF 2.0, released in 2009, was the last major release, emphasizing ease of use, enhanced functionality and performance. It coincided with the release of Java EE 6.

Like JSF 2.2, JSF 2.3 is considered a relatively minor update with, various incremental features requested by the community. But this JSR could be viewed as a harbinger spec request. It was cited last year by a group of enterprise Java mavens who would become the Java EE Guardians as an example of an Oracle-led enterprise Java spec suffering from noticeable neglect. Josh Juneau's blog post from April 2016 has more information that.

Guardians co-founder Reza Rahman characterized JSR 372 in a recent blog post as a distinctly community driven Java EE 8 JSR with contributions coming from many key members of the Guardians. "Indeed, the community has driven JSF 2.3 very heavily, directly committing many of the features into the Mojarra code base," he wrote. Mojarra is the reference implementation of Oracle JSF from version 1.8_8. The name replaced the original JSF RI.

The JSF 2.3 release was about improving the clarity of the existing JSF spec and introducing a small, targeted set of new features directed by community contribution. Among other things, this release is the first not lagging one version behind the Java EE version in which it was bundled. JSF 2.3 will be able to leverage platform features from Java EE 8 and Java SE 8. This release also supports MVC 1.0, AJAX method invocation, WebSocket integration, better CDI support and alignment with the Java SE 8 Date/Time API.

About the Author

John K. Waters is the editor in chief of a number of Converge360.com sites, with a focus on high-end development, AI and future tech. He's been writing about cutting-edge technologies and culture of Silicon Valley for more than two decades, and he's written more than a dozen books. He also co-scripted the documentary film Silicon Valley: A 100 Year Renaissance, which aired on PBS. He can be reached at [email protected].