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I am starting development on a new web application which uses JSF 2 as the view technology. I have no prior experience with JSF and am a bit confused about the concepts.
I read some documentation on JSF and the main idea was that it a component based framework. Applications are built from components.

But now there are two ways of creating a component, as I understood:
1. composition - a collection of components which can be included in a page
2. composite - a new component that encapsulate some components and exposes an interface to users

What is the basic rule in choosing between them?
For example, I want to show a list of products to an user. For this list I should create my own component which I add to the main layout, to separate the view code. So should this list be a composition or composite?

I hope somebody can help me clear up this basic stuff.

Thanks in advance,

BalusC
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ats
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2 Answers2

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Go for composition (templating) when you want a reuseable template which you normally include only once in the main view. E.g. header, menu, footer, single table, etc. Go for composite component when you want a reuseable component with a bean-value-binding which you can include as many as you want in the main view. E.g. a group of label, input and message components (although a tag file is often better for this).

See also:

Community
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BalusC
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  • Do you have a reference to some documentation that supports your comment here?Seeing as composition was really the only re-use option in jsf 1.x and composite has only been introduced in 2.x, why would the behavior of composition change? We were using (probably abusing) composition extensively in a project, then tried to run in 2.0 and found everything using composition was quite broken. – digitaljoel May 25 '10 at 21:26
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Perhaps the following link to the JEE 6 Tutorial would help.

Determining Whether You Need a Custom Component or Renderer

MathiasJ
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Maarten van Leunen
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