A common problem encountered by writers of dynamic JSF 1.x components (like Metawidget) was "at what point in the lifecycle can I safely manipulate the component tree"?
For a page's initital GET request, there weren't many lifecycle methods you could hook into - you basically had encodeBegin. For subsequent POST-backs there were a slew of hooks, including decode, processValidators and processUpdates, but none were at exactly the right place in the lifecycle to do safe component tree manipulation. What would be 'exactly the right place'? Namely:
