JSR-276 is targeted at IDE vendors and the JSF component library vendors who depend on them for exposing their components to developers. The idea of JSR-276 is to let JSF component library vendors provide a far richer set of descriptive data about their components so that JSR-276 compliant tools can expose that data to the users. Examples of such data include:

  • What kinds of components are allowed to be nested within each component?

  • The grouping of components into categories such as, "layout managers"

  • A very rich "contract declaration" mechanism that allows component libraries to declare contracts and to further more declare which components adhere to those contracts.

There are many more exciting metadata elements in JSR-276. Check itb out yourself at <http://jcp.org/en/jsr/summary?id=276>. If lots of people show interest in this, we'll have a better chance of IDE's supporting it. Once the spec goes final, let's make a point to add issuetracker issues in the major IDEs to support it.

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