Mojarra 2.0, the production-quality, reference implementation for JSF 2.0 is out! Yet another step closer to v3 final. This will of course be part of GlassFish v3 later this year (with an integration planned as early as this week) but Maven and standalone are two other options to grab the bits. In his blog, Ryan lists a set of very good resources (mainly blog posts) on JSF 2.0. Earlier this year, Ryan authored a series of blogposts which were also very detailed and informative. He covers tools support (yes, it's coming very soon as Cay discusses for NetBeans in his latest blog post) and recognizes the numerous contributors to this major release.

Note also that while JSF 2.0 is set to be part of Java EE 6, it does not require a servlet 3.0 container. In the case of GlassFish v3.0, web.xml is optional and there is no longer the need to declare the Faces servlet (see Cay's entry on that as well).

Mojarra as an implementation of JSF 2.0 is the first one out but it is also set to be part of a number of coopetitor's. Finally, now is probably a good time to skim throught The Aquarium posts tagged with the jsf2 and mojarra keywords.

Added The latest release is Mojarra 2.0.1, see Jim's post.

JSF 2.0 is one of the key Java EE 6 components. As an API, JSF 2.0 (aka JSR 314) is in the Early Access Draft (EDR) phase. Jim Driscoll announces the availability of Mojarra EDR 1 which is the Mojarra (a GlassFish sub-project) implementation of that specification. This EDR release should soon be available on the GlassFish v2 update center and later on on the GlassFish v3 update center.

As a reminder, JSF 2.0 has the following objectives: make writing JSF components easier, integrated support for Ajax, reduced configuration, portlet 2.0 alignment, integration of facelets, support for Rest principles, and more. Ed has a nice summary of yet more features. As an implementation, Mojarra also has a number of interesting features beyond what the specification requires such as Groovy integration for a save/reload development paradigm.

Java EE 6 is scheduled for the first half of 2009. The final version of GlassFish v3 will implement Java EE 6.
More on this news at TSS.

Ryan has written a good summary describing the differences between Server-Side and Client-Side State Saving in JSF, specially from the perspective of the RI used in GlassFish. Check out the description at the Wiki Page.