The project, under the auspices of the Sun Microsystems-driven Java Community Process, already has five primary goals: make custom components much easier to develop, add first-class AJAX support, incorporate a page description language based on Facelets into the core JSF specification, reduce the required configuration, and provide for better compatibility among JSF component libraries from different vendors.

Roger Kitain, staff engineer at Sun, and Ed Burns, senior staff engineer, are co-specification leads on JSR 314. The pair hopes to make JSF a clearer path between the Web and the complicated back-end systems and capabilities Java provides. That effort will begin with the simplification of the configuration process for JSF applications.

“One of the problems people have had with JSF is that when they sit down and develop custom components with JSF, there are different things you have to [configure] in different areas,” Kitain said. “You have to remember these different areas to piece those together, like component render associations. We're looking to simplify all that by making fewer areas to keep track of when developing this stuff.”

That means adding in the ability to configure components inside of annotations. It also means having fewer XML files scattered around and consolidating configuration files in easier-to-find places, said Kitain.