JSF backing bean structure (best practices)

Question

I hope that in this post, I can get people\'s opinions on best practices for the interface between JSF pages and backing beans.

One thing that I never can settle on

Answer 1

Great question. I suffered a lot with the same dilemma when I moved to JSF. It really depends on your application. I'm from the Java EE world so I would recommend to have as little business logic in your backing beans as possible. If the logic is purely related to the presentation of your page, then it is fine to have it in the backing bean.

I believe one of the (many) strengths of JSF is actually the fact that you can expose domain objects directly on the managed beans. I would therefore strongly recommend the <:outputText value="#{myBean.anObject.anObjectProperty}" /> approach, otherwise you end up making too much work for yourself in manually exposing each property. Furthermore it would be a bit of a mess when inserting or updating data if you encapsulated all the properties. There are situations where a single domain object may not be sufficient. In those cases I prepare a ValueObject before exposing it on the bean.

EDIT: Actually, if you are going to encapsulate every object property that you want to expose, I would recommend that you instead bind UI components to the backing bean and then inject the content directly into the value of the component.

In terms of bean structure the turning point for me was when I forcefully ignored all the stuff I knew about building web applications and started treating it as a GUI application instead. JSF mimics Swing a lot and therefore the best practices for developing Swing applications would mostly also apply to building JSF applications.