Take a break from your software to read this: Today (February 12, 2010) marks the 20th anniversary of a remarkably simple, unimportant, yet incredibly special and sentimental event. A perspective that few consider in their daily lives.

A new minor release of the PrettyFaces JSF extension for Bookmarkable/Pretty URLs is now available for download. PrettyFaces is now backwards compatible with Java 5. Version 1.2.2: binary, source

What makes Pretty URLs in JSF so hard, and so slow?

Speed up development, reduce bandwidth, enhance user experience. This article gives a brief overview of JSF navigation, some of the problems, and potentially how to solve them by enabling bookmarkable, pretty URLs. Put simply… in my view, out of the box, JSF is a web framework designed for web-applications, not designed for web-sites. PrettyFaces addresses most of these issues.

Target audience for this article:

1. The reader is familiar with JSF navigation.
2. The reader is attempting to create a JSF app with bookmarkable “pretty” URLs. E.g.: …/mysite/archives/2008/11/11/
3. The reader is familiar with HTTP request/response at a basic level.