JavaServer Faces (JSF) is a model-view-presenter framework typically used to create HTML form based web applications. Using the standard components and render kit, stateful HTML views can be defined using Facelets or JSP tags and wired to model data and application logic via backing beans.

The Flash concept is taken from Ruby on Rails and provides a way to pass temporary objects between the user views generated by the faces lifecycle. As in Rails, anything one places in the flash will be exposed to the next view encountered by the same user session and then cleared out. It is important to note that “next view” may have the same view id as the previous view.

The JSF implementation must ensure the proper behaviour of the flash is preserved even in the case of a <navigation-case> that contains a <redirect />. The implementation must ensure the proper behavior of the flash is preserved even in the case of adjacent GET requests on the same session. This allows Faces applications to fully utilize the “Post/Redirect/Get” design pattern.

JSF provides special tags to create common layout for a web application called facelets tags. These tags gives flexibility to manage common parts of a multiple pages at one place.

Namespaces:

xmlns:h="http://xmlns.jcp.org/jsf/html"
xmlns:ui="http://xmlns.jcp.org/jsf/facelets"