You’re right about the potential for JSF; since it’s an actual Java standard, it has an automatic base level of acceptance. We actually aren’t trying to convince anyone to use Beehive over JSF, though. Beehive Page Flow integrates with JSF as its Navigation layer. JSF is really useful as view tier technology — components and events work great for intra-page interactions (across multiple server requests), but it needs a real controller tier, and its NavigationHandler is easily swapped out for this purpose. Beehive took the approach that JSF should be encouraged as a view layer, peer to JSP.

Thanks for your response. Actually I knew that Beehive first debuted a few years ago, however it wasn’t a V1.0, or you may say, a production ready release. I usually prefer not to use pre-1.0 versions of tools, frameworks, and libraries in customer projects.

A few months ago I took a quick look at Beehive and I really liked it. I liked it more than Struts and I liked it more than WebWork as well.

But the problem is, now that the JSF has become the de facto standard Web framework for J2EE, rarely someone would use Beehive in a J2EE project.

I mean, Beehive might be even technically better than JSF, but it’s very hard to convince someone, or to be convinced, to choose Beehive over JSF.

Regards,
Bumble Bee

The piece of Beehive that plays in the space of those frameworks (WebWork, etc.) is NetUI. Reasons to use it include its annotations, its “v2″ controller features, like reusable page flows that can be nested in other flows, or its UI features, like AJAX-enabled Tree/Grid. It really adds to the action-based model rather than competing directly with it (and it integrates well as the controller tier for JSF, which is mainly useful as view tier technology).

In some cases, traditional action-based frameworks are sufficient if you’re already invested in them (but then, the same could have been said of plain Servlet/JSP :) ). If you try out Beehive, the team would definitely be interested to get your feedback on whether its advantages make it worth the wait (user@beehive.apache.org).

Cheers,
Rich