JavaServer Faces technology establishes the standard for building server-side user interfaces. The JSF APIs are being designed so that they can be leveraged by tools that will make web application development even easier.

JSF technology includes (a) A set of APIs for representing UI components and managing their state, handling events and input validation, defining page navigation, and supporting internationalization and accessibility. (b) A JSP custom tag library for expressing a JSF interface within a JSP page.

JSF technology leverages existing, standard UI and web-tier concepts without limiting developers to a particular mark-up language, protocol, or client device. The UI component classes included with JSF technology encapsulate the component functionality. Thus JSF UI components can be rendered to various client devices. By combining the UI component functionality with custom renderers developers can construct custom tags to a particular client device. JSF technology provides a custom renderer and a JSP custom tag library for rendering to an HTML client. So Java EE applications can use JSF technology.

The JSF architecture clearly defines a separation between application logic and presentation while making it easy to connect the presentation layer to the application code. This design enables each member of a web application development team to focus on his or her piece of the development process, and it also provides a simple programming model to link the pieces together. For example, web page developers with no programming expertise can use JavaServer Faces UI component tags to link to application code from within a web page without writing any scripts.