Fig.1: WebTree in Agent Management System

In the early days of the Web, building interfaces was easy. With little or no Javascript and no cascading style sheets, the rudiments of constructing a user interface could be learned in an hour or two and professional competency could be achieved with a week of steady practice.

Now as Web 2.0 evolves dealing with the massive amounts of Javascript, AJAX, and style sheets – creating interactive user interfaces with a smooth flow of events can be a nightmare.

What’s the Value of JSF?

Using JSF reduces the number of Web programming details you need to worry about. With the right JSF tools, you can AJAX-enable your application with nothing but tag attributes, or style it with one ‘web.xml’ file setting.

Choosing Stylable UI Controls

Infragistics, long an industry leader in the space of UI controls, offers Java developers a complete set of rich, stylable, AJAX-enabled components in NetAdvantage for JSF. It empowers consistent user experiences with its wide variety of components. These include a master/detail data table, calendar, 2D/3D chart, menu, tree, tab, stack and side bar, dialog window and a set of data entry fields.

NetAdvantage for JSF integrates into many visual development tools for Java, like Eclipse and NetBeans. In fact, these components have been certified as Ready for Rational Software by IBM reassuring developers of their compatibility with IBM’s Rational Application Developer. Seamless integration into a number of IDEs is a sign of an established toolset.

A final factor in choosing a toolset is how well the vendor stands behind it. Infragistics offers two volume releases a year, updates, documentation and samples, code-level support given by expert developers who know JSF inside-and-out, plus subscribers can download all source code.

AJAX from the Ground Up

NetAdvantage for JSF was engineered from the beginning to fully support AJAX within its fundamental design. NetAdvantage for JSF components even use AJAX in portal environments like IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic and JBoss.

For example, many JSF components feature expand and collapse behaviors. Infragistics has AJAX-enabled this behavior in their control set, allowing you to populate rows in child tables (or tree nodes, etc) in response to a mouse click that expands their parent. This enables your J2EE application to intelligently load the objects it presents on-demand, making scalable applications possible. In the Agent Management System screen shot, you see the WebTree illustrating this Load on Demand design pattern when the “Southwest” sales region is expanded.

NetAdvantage for JSF Resources: For detailed product information, support, online help, samples, and pricing please visit: infragistics.com/jsf

Copyright 1996-2008 Infagistics, Inc. All rights reserved. Infragistics, the Infragistics logo, and NetAdvantage are registered trademarks of Infragistics, Inc. WebTree is a trademark of Infragistics, Inc. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the respective property of their owners.