JavaServer Faces
I made the switch to JSF in late Spring, 2005. My team had just adopted the use of Spring and Hibernate - and loved using them. We had just started a new web development effort and knew we'd also need a flexible and easy to use UI framework.
I was a big Struts fan, but often got frustrated with JSP and how much code seemed to be needed in my pages (foreach, if, etc). In addition to providing very modular web UI components, JSF provided many other features I liked and had gotten used to: a scoped managed bean facility and configurable page navigation were two biggies. I also liked how JSF abstracted the idea of a request into an Action, with a corresponding series of listeners that could be called to "set the stage".
The one thing I really missed was the ability to dynamically arrange page fragments, like I had done using Tiles. There were some Tiles/JSF jars that others had written, but I could not get them to work correctly. Eventually I just wrote my own. Amazingly, it was not that hard to do.
JSF was great for me. It is one of those technology innovations that sometimes seem to rise to the surface right when you need something new. Unfortunately (or not), with new web UI developments like Ruby and RIAs, it's lifespan will probably be rather short.
I was a big Struts fan, but often got frustrated with JSP and how much code seemed to be needed in my pages (foreach, if, etc). In addition to providing very modular web UI components, JSF provided many other features I liked and had gotten used to: a scoped managed bean facility and configurable page navigation were two biggies. I also liked how JSF abstracted the idea of a request into an Action, with a corresponding series of listeners that could be called to "set the stage".
The one thing I really missed was the ability to dynamically arrange page fragments, like I had done using Tiles. There were some Tiles/JSF jars that others had written, but I could not get them to work correctly. Eventually I just wrote my own. Amazingly, it was not that hard to do.
JSF was great for me. It is one of those technology innovations that sometimes seem to rise to the surface right when you need something new. Unfortunately (or not), with new web UI developments like Ruby and RIAs, it's lifespan will probably be rather short.
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