Newbie in JSF: composition vs composite

Question

I am starting development on a new web application which uses JSF 2 as the view technology. I have no prior experience with JSF and am a bit confused about the concepts.
I read some documentation on JSF and the main idea was that it a component based framework. Applications are built from components.

But now there are two ways of creating a component, as I understood:
1. composition - a collection of components which can be included in a page
2. composite - a new component that encapsulate some components and exposes an interface to users

What is the basic rule in choosing between them?
For example, I want to show a list of products to an user. For this list I should create my own component which I add to the main layout, to separate the view code. So should this list be a composition or composite?

I hope somebody can help me clear up this basic stuff.

Thanks in advance,

Answer 1

Go for composition (templating) when you want a reuseable template which you normally include only once in the main view. E.g. header, menu, footer, single table, etc. Go for composite component when you want a reuseable component with a bean-value-binding which you can include as many as you want in the main view. E.g. a group of label, input and message components (although a tag file is often better for this).

See also:

• When to use <ui:include>, tag files, composite components and/or custom components?

Answer 2

Perhaps the following link to the JEE 6 Tutorial would help.

Determining Whether You Need a Custom Component or Renderer