The ICEfaces EE Composite Components Library provides an enhanced set of custom ICEfaces components. These components offer the following:

• Over 30 Composite Components to further enrich your ICEfaces application!
  
• Simplified components and classes to smooth ICEfaces development.
  
• Extra features and functionality not found in the standard ICEfaces Components.
  
• Best-practice engineered components and JSF bean integration geared for enterprise deployments.
  

Composite components are created with JSF Facelets technology. Facelets wires together components to build a component tree on the server. This allows for code reuse because with Facelets, you can turn any collection of page markup into a UI component to be inserted into the component tree.

A composite component can be considered a a special type of template that acts as a component. A template does not define content, but provides placeholders for content and the layout, orientation, flow, structure, and logical organization of elements on the page. We can think of a template as a document with "blanks" that will be filled in with real data and user interface controls at request time.

ICEfaces EE Composite Components will typically have an attribute 'bean' that will provide content - other attributes are used to configure the component. The composite component jar contains .xhtml markup, bean code, a faces-config.xml file and resources such as stylesheets, images and javascript files. The sophistication of the various components range from simple .xhtml markup to a code base developed over hundreds of hours by the ICEsoft Professional Services team. If a composite component does not suit your particular use case, the 'template' can be modified or enhanced.

Remember, Facelets and JSP are mutually exclusive, so if you are using the icefaces-ee-composite.jar, you must be working with Facelets as your page definition language (PDL), not JSP.