Zhai, Warren [IT] wrote:
I only started looking at JSF a couple weeks ago, and I am convinced it's a
better presentation-tier web framework than STRUTS. Nonetheless, my current
project is STRUTS-based, and it's much easier if I can plug bits and pieces of
JSF into the application we are working on.
Backward compatibility has always been important in IT.
Yes and backward compatibility also is the biggest burden of IT.
Look at the mess current Intel processors are or the Win32API
or even the Java API in certain areas.
I really prefer a clean cut, than dragging broken designs along
for decades.
The more dominant and successful the technical predecessor is, the more
important it is to maintain backward compatibility to ease developer
transition. I feel that JSF is overall a better framework, but the fact is
that Sun, and other JSF vendors have offered little to help developers to
transition from STRUTS.
Eclipse is the counterexample of this, because the plugin APIs have been
severely broken pretty much ever major release, but at least the
breaking of things helped that tool tremendously to gain performance
and make things easier to implement.
I would save the end user experience matters not backward compatibility,
the end user does not care if there are broken apis or something else,
all they want are dynamic websites they can do their stuff with.
I even would say to break things to keep things clean is more often
found than the absymality Microsoft and Intel do, to drag along the
broken designs (even if they do not work anymore) so that the things
work along the way for a while and after a decade or so they break
anyway for one reason or the other.
