It is fun to watch Matt go through his application, porting it to every web framework out there (reminds me of when Kris was doing this to the Wafer web log software).
Now he gets into JSF.
Of all the MVC Frameworks I’ve developed with in the last few weeks (Struts, Spring MVC, WebWork and Tapestry) – JSF was by far the worst. And it’s not the implementations that are the problem, it’s the spec itself (as far as I can tell). Plain and simple, it does not simplify web development.
I spent 3 days developing a simple JSF app – most of it which I had done in the first day. The last 2 days have been spent migrating to MyFaces and trying to find clean ways to do things. My perspective on JSF after this experience? Run away. Run far, far away. All of the above mentioned frameworks are MUCH superior to this technology. Let’s get on with the things I learned.
Painful. I have run into the same problems. It seems that the only reason to use JSF is: “Well, it is a standard, a bunch of big companies are behind it, and the tools will come which make it simple”.
Does that give you warm fuzzies? :)
These days my choice of framework is normally:
- Event driven: I want a large event driven system, that makes a good use of components, and lets me develop in Java, and my designers design in HTML…. Tapestry (not JSF)
- Simple Request/Response: I want something simple, which sits on top of the request/response system….WebWork 2 (not Struts)
This assumes that there are no politics, that I am not working with a team of experts in another framework, etc etc…
I hope JSF 2.0 thinks about bringing in other good framework guys this time (e.g. Howard, the Swinglet guys etc).
Let’s make WEB stuff easy. How often are you going to deploy the same application magically in different ways. It just isn’t that simple!
