Hi, I have been using Struts 1.x for some time now.
I have been looking at JSF for the last couple of weeks. JSF is such a departure from Struts its simply depressing. I do understand that JSF is a component framework. Whereas Struts is an action framework. The biggest problem is that the web is an action environment: Request/Response (Pull/Push). Trying to wrap a component framework around such an environment is making things more difficult to program, at least with the current version of JSF. Simply due to the fact that you are required to use a set of JSF components which by definition is limiting, if not harder to use. All this to get events à la Visual Basic... if I wanted to do event programming I would find a job using Visual Basic. Yes yes I know, its seems that the answer to everything in regards to JSF limitations is: its customizable. Plus you cannot do any GETs, everything in JSF is a POST. There are thousands of applications out there that do GET/POST !!! Who decided that? By creating a specification that from the beginning which is limited is frustrating... especially when you look at the heavyweights behind the specification. The sadist part to it, its the industry standard. All of this is suppose to make development easier and faster thus less expensive. Now where did this logic come from? Not only must you learn the new JSF specification... you must continue to use JSTL... plus learn how to jump thru hops to get the page to display... because of the JSF limitations but also due to some dead-end rules (e.g.: such as you cannot embed JSTL with a JSF tag). As an example, IBM has its own JSF tag to allow you to mix and match these tags. Plus there are at least 3 different implementations of JSF out there... all different. Now in order to circumvent the GET restriction... you need to wrap again... and a new specification is emerging... SEAM. Which is morphing into a JCP: http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=299 So not only must you master: HTML, JavaScript, CSS, JSTL, JSF, now you must also know SEAM (without EJBs). Not to mention AJAX. All of this to get a web page to display. I may revisit JSF in the future and for some I hope JSF is useful. Converting an application from Struts 1.x to JSF has no advantage at the moment... just lots of problems. I have started to look at Struts2... which looks promising. I was wondering if the book WebWork in Action is still worth reading, if I were to use Struts2? Regards, maestro
