My Experiences with JSF

I am currently converting a large Struts application to JSF. My first instinct was to simply replace the Struts tags with the equivalent JSF tags and JSTL.

Turns out things aren't so simple. JSF & JSP don't really play all that well together as detailed in the following article: Improving JSF by Dumping JSP. So this means if you mix normal HTML and JSP tags you may run into unexpected problems. To avoid this you must fully understand the rendering lifecyle of JSPs and JSF. Talk about a maintainability nightmare. If you want to avoid this, you must buy into converting your old JSPs tag for tag to the equivalent JSF tags. That doesn't seem easier to me. But wait, the tools are here to save us. They didn't save us from the nightmare of EJB 2.1, they won't save us now.

The framework Facelets was created to solve this issue by by completely replacing the JSP layer we all know and hate. It drops the need to fully convert your app over to JSF tags, you simply use HTML plus JSF tags where needed. Great, I found it frustrating to use the JSF markup to output the HTML I wanted to display in the first place. No more! Also, no more crappy code generation on the backend. Todays' date isn't 1998, lets move on.

Facelets make JSF tolerable but still I think it should be more simple. Why does JSF introduce its own dependency injection when EJB3 already has one? Because JSF came out before EJB3! Enter Seam the latest from Gavin King(author of hibernate) which vastly simplifies the JSF configuration using annotations and tightly integrates JSF with EJB3 and JBPM
The Web Beans JSR aims to standardize Seam.

My prediction is that Web Beans technology will be the BFG that allows them to punch holes in IBMs' armour and finally makes web application implementation simpler.

Rajesh Patel
rpatel@harpoontech.com
Harpoon Technologies