A Gentle Introduction to the JSF 2.2 Faces Flow

My well-respected colleague and good friend Arun Gupta continues his admirable effort to provide some very early coverage of Java EE 7 features. I thought I'd highlight his blog entry on JSF 2.2 Faces Flows written in this vein.

As many CDI adopters are aware of, Java EE 6 introduced the concept of conversation scopes. The conversation scope is a very simple, lightweight and powerful way of having greater control over application state in workflow-oriented applications (e.g. multi-step wizards). JSF 2.2 Faces Flows takes that concept to the next level by standardizing fairly well-understood workflow modeling concerns that have been been there in ADF Task Flow, Spring Web Flow and Apace MyFaces CODI. The JSF 2.2 Faces Flows are a synthesis of those ideas focused on type-safety, annotations, simplicity and fluency.

In his blog entry, Arun does a good job of explaining the basic concepts. He discusses the feature, explains the motivation, introduces the API, links to a great video demoing the feature and references further resources.