Tomahawk - more of a random collection of components without a consistent API layer. Tomahawk has not had a release in a very long time and has not had any new development in ages.
Tomahawk Sandbox - a really unstructured development environment. There are no plugins or help to the authors to write components, JSP tag files or support facelets. This is much more active that Tomahawk. It is a hodge-podge of components though, some based on Dojo, some with their own custom Ajax framework, others definitely in more of an unstable state. The AJAX components are not made to work with other PPR libraries (Trinidad, IceFaces, A4J) RichFaces - Requires A4J so makes it mostly incompatible with Trinidad and IceFaces. It has a small component library and is very inflexible the last time I used it (breaks badly when you have non-normal use cases). RichFaces hacks the JSF lifecycle to do what they want, so may break 3rd party libraries that expect the standard lifecycle. It has custom skinning, but I never used it to compare it to others. Trinidad - The most components out there and supports PPR/AJAX as well as a skinning framework. It has a very nice maven plugin for custom component development to enhance Trinidad. The documentation is very poor when you try to enhance it though, there is a lot of architecture and framework that is robust an completely undocumented. The default skinning is darned ugly, so you will need to write you own CSS files to make their components look half way decent, where RichFaces is nice out of the box. IceFaces - really awesome architecture and LnF, but is the most non-standard so has problems working with others, you pretty much have to write your own renderers for 3rd party components. Other than that I have never used it. I personally chose Trinidad because of (1) the Apache 2 license is better than LGPL of JBoss, (2) the community is much more responsive that JBoss (took forever for RichFaces to fix reported bugs), (3) has a much larger component set than others and (4) is JSF spec friendly so "plays nicer" than others. I use: Trinidad 1.2.7-SNAPSHOT Tomahawk 1.1.7-SNAPSHOT (for a few components, but may stop using altogether shortly) Tomahawk-sandbox 1.1.7-SNAPSHOT (for a few components, but may stop using altogether shortly) Facelets 1.1.14 JBoss Seam 2.0.1GA I don't have any major problems with Seam and Trinidad. They just fixed 2.0.2 for me for <s:convesationPropagation> and Trinidad, so they are willing to help. Be aware that although Seam is an absolutely awesome tool with no comparable alternative IMO, they *love* to break backwards compatibility between releases, even minor ones. They almost never deprecate their APIs, they simply disappear. I can't wait for JSF 2.0 and WebBeans so that some of the code becomes standard and have the API set in stone. My $0.02 -Andrew On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 7:05 AM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hello, > > I've been noticing a lot of traffic related to Trinidad and > wondered if people could offer their insights and experience on > the following: > > How do the Trinidad components compare to Tomahawk, Tomahawk > Sandbox and/or RichFaces? (The later three are part of my > typical technology stack, where I have no experience yet with > Trinidad). > > What are the advantages/disadvantages? Are the components > themeselves more compelling/useful from a user experience > perspective? How well does it integrate with the above and > Seam? > > TIA! >
