Well the spec finally shipped a week after the first posting said it would.

Lots of fun and fascinating new things in this release. At first glance it does not look like the book will have to be rewritten but I'll know more as I read through the spec...

I still don't see how to put links into tables but I'll look it over and see what I can find. I'm sure its been addressed with all the talk on the forum over the last several months.

Here is the list of major changes from the spec

• UIComponent Hierarchy Shuffling

Added several new interfaces for the components. Looks like the hierarchy has been cleaned up a bit, the UML is still lame get Omondo for Eclipse and draw some decent pictures :-) I love the UIMessage component that should clean up some of the nastiness of displaying errors.

• Bypass validation and model updates

Finally able to do cancel buttons, cool!

• Concrete HTML component classes

Supposed to make tooling easier. Looks like it could make other things easier too since most JSF use will be with HTML.

• Flexible way to map to FacesServlet

Good stuff. It was important to not release something that required /faces/* as the servlet mapping...

• ResopnseWriter changes

I don't see how these api's will make things easier for tool vendors. I'll have to dig more...

• New value binding mechanism

This is really cool! Now we can use a programatic value for attributes. For example I could use one of the properties of a java bean as the CSS class for a component.

• New method binding mechanism

Also very cool. You can now directly invoke one of your managed beans methods from a button push or other action on your JSF UI.

• New component binding mechanism

This is really cool and will change (not sure if its simpler but its definitely different:) the way that I suggest you build apps in the presentation. Can't wait to dig more into this!

• Maps and Lists in the faces-config file

Cool, but not vastly different

• State Saving mechanism

This is great but makes for changes in the way custom components are built. Basically this will make is easier for the component developer to not have to write code twice (once for server side state and once for client side state).

• Localization mechanism

This looks much better than the EA4 mechanism. I'll have to play around with it some though to fully grok it.

• Adapter pattern for pluggable Factory classes

This is a very good thing, with this change it will be much easier to get into and customize the way JSF implementations work since you can just customize one small thing and leave the rest as the implementor intended.

• New hyperlink component/renderer combinations

It looks like this is part of the solution to being able to put links into tables (iterating did not allow JSF to uniquely id the links in EA4) so this is very good.

• Event mechanism implementation changes

Looks like this is mostly an implementation change and does not effect us much. There is a rename from valuechanged to valuechange to make things more JavaBean like.

• New UIData component and Table Renderer

This whole data/table thing looks really cool, a lot more like JTable and its underlying model in this release, can't wait to play with it!

This is basically just a summarization of what I could find in the spec in an hour or so. I'll keep posting here as I find more fun and interesting stuff.