Unlike most of my blog posts, where I try to describe the easiest possible way to do things, in this posting, I'll instead go over a Java-based custom JSF component that responds to the Ajax tag. The reason being that there simply aren't any examples out there of how to do this, and at least two people have expressed interest in finding exactly out how this is done. I'd advise anyone considering doing this to make really sure that you can't do the same thing in a Composite Component (you usually can), but sometimes, a Java-based custom JSF component is going to be required.

We're going to cover the following topics here, and it's going to be a little more code than usual, but I suspect that this will end up saving some folks a bunch of time, so lets plow forward. I'll cover:

• Ajax listeners
• Facelet components
• Integrating the two