SF itself is fairly straightforward. Getting it functional in an appserver is another matter. Originally, I used MyFaces and Tomahawk. More recently, I’ve replaced MyFaces with the Sun JSF Reference Implementation (RI). Tomahawk, although a MyFaces library works just fine with the RI.
The JSF-impl jar is part of the server for JEE-compliant servers, such as recent versions of JBoss. For Tomcat, it has to be explicitly linked into the WAR (?). At any rate, it has to be put into the application’s classpath, and everyone seems to be putting it into the WAR and not the server lib directory. Since there are possible threading implications, I’m doing likewise.
Tomcat5 also needs the EL-ri JAR placed in its classpath. Tomcat6 includes the required classes as part of the base distribution.
For the whole set of dependencies, see the Maven POM for my sandbox project: here