Saturday, November 18, 2006

JSF - what are you made of?

If you have been using JSF for a while, you'd understand my feelings better. JSF has failed to keep it's promise of making developers' life easy. There are so many instances where JSF would not scale to the requirements and made the lives of developers miserable.

So far in my current project, I focused more on the middleware and the infrastructural aspects and decided to stay away from the presentation layer for a while. My frustration levels have increased when I was asked to develop few components for the presentation layer using JSF. It simply did not scale. The same requirements could have been implemented very easily using Struts/Tiles.

Thought of Struts makes me happy, I began my career in Software almost the same time when Struts was born. My career grew along with Struts. 5 good years of working with Struts. The combination of Struts, Tiles met most of the challenging requirements, oh yeah, even with AJAX. What was the need to create a bloated API like JSF that sucks when it comes to simple tasks, even like downloading a file. And coming to the different implementations of JSF - if you are using MyFaces, you are little lucky and if you decide to go with the JSF-RI, expect the frustation level of your development to be on the higher side. My experience with JSF hasn't been an happy one. Going forward, I'd be happy to use Struts for my projects.

No comments: