What's new in JSF 2.2?

With the release of JavaEE 7 many developers have struggled with the question: "What are the new features that JavaEE 7 brings to web development?" In this post series, we'll be dealing with the server-side web development component of JavaEE 7, namely JSF 2.2.

I've been a JSF developer since its initial version, 1.0, back in 2004. Since we're currently in 2014 this makes me kind of a JSF dinosaur, with nearly 10 years of experience. But I'm not sad about being old - in fact for JSF all these years have been very kind, and we can certainly assert that in its current version (2.2) JSF is one of the most compelling server-side web development frameworks available. Let's try to list some of its strong points:

• Strong community
• Big developer base
• JSR-backed specification
• Multiple component vendors
• Strong IDE and tools support (IntelliJ IDEA included)
• Active development
• HTML5 support
• Built-in & Natural templating
• Stateful flow development
• Part of JavaEE

Some of the above points may be subjective, but in the next few posts I hope to have presented some of the most relevant changes and new features brought by JSF 2.2 to developers; and also hope to have motivated you enough to consider migrating or upgrading to this new version.

1. New namespaces
2. HTML5 support with passthrough attributes
3. HTML Natural templating
4. FileUpload
5. java.util.Collection support on DataModels
6. Configurable Resources
7. FacesFlow