14 Oct 2006 0835H

JavaServer Faces and Creative Development

Creative Development was the umbrella term for tasks people like me performed for the last ten years on the web. The basic description was (and is): take, or design a website in Photoshop, generate optimized, web-ready assets in the form of minimalist code pages in HTML, usually with some light interactivity written in Javascript, and tightly compressed graphics. Then we hand them off to developers, at which point this becomes a black box for the creatives. Well, this state of things continued for a good long time, and in fact, those first techniques for tabular layout and compressing graphics in David Siegel’s Creating Killer Web Sites back in 1996 still work today, although we no longer use tabular layout.

In the last few days I’ve been working a lot more closely with developers using a templating system for JavaServer Pages called, strangely enough, JavaServer Faces, or Faces for short. Essentially, Faces templates are kind of a no-man’s-land between the business logic that developers are hard at work building and the creative assets that creative developers painstakingly convert into production-ready assets. There are a set of tags that one has to learn, but they are finite, and used in conjunction with JSTL, another library of tags that enables the basic functionality of webpages, formatting data, conditional statements, iteration, these form the assets that developers need to have to get stuff running.

This means essentially that developers have to wind up coding twice, not just the business objects that pages get and set data in, but also have to take the HTML and sometimes reformat it to insert the code in there. This is a rather tedious process and as it often happens towards the end of a cycle, can be given rather short-shrift by harried developers. It’s an opportunity for creative developers or other HTML production workers to get a leg up. The tags aren’t hard to learn, although, it’s worth it to take a semester long class at the local junior college in basic web development, like a class in PHP, ASP Classic or ASP.NET (.NET would be best because it is, essentially, designed to be a JSP-killer) to get an idea of how the whole development process works. After that, it should be much easier to understand the development frameworks.

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