JSF 2.0 or something else?

[John Brosan]

Hello everyone,

I apologize if this forum is not the correct place to pose this question. Being a JSF forum, I expect some bias, but that's actually a good thing.

I am currently working on creating some web services for a pet project. Mostly for self education purposes. The web services will be providing both REST and SOAP. I would like to be able to change the user interface from something like JSF 2.x to, say, plain ol' JQuery, or even Flex or JavaFX or JSF 3.x (down the road of course)

I've done very little with JSF and what I have done was a long time ago. Would someone be so kind as to kind of give me the skinny on JSF 2.x? Is this something I should take the time to learn? Is it substantially better than the 1.x versions of JSF? How performant is JSF 2 and how scalable? I've been looking around the Internet trying to get a feel for this, but its mostly been hit or miss.

I should mention that I am using Netbeans 6.8-M1 and Glassfish v3 for EJB 3.1 which also includes JSF 2.x under 64bit Linux

Any insight that could be provided would be most appreciated.



Thank you,
John

[Cameron Wallace McKenzie]

I'm a big fan of JSF2.0. But I will say that at its heart, it is very similar to earlier versions. Many of the classes are the same, and many of the tags are the same. There is increased support for AJAX and JavaScript elements, and there have been many general improvements that make it very flexible.

If you're really cutting edge, do the best of both worlds, and play with the RichFaces implementation that uses JSF2.0. Then you're really doing some kewl stuff!

If you want some really neat user interface stuff, and you want to learn something neat, I'd even suggest GWT. I love working with Google Web Toolkit.

[John Brosan]

Cameron Wallace McKenzie wrote:I'm a big fan of JSF2.0. But I will say that at its heart, it is very similar to earlier versions. Many of the classes are the same, and many of the tags are the same. There is increased support for AJAX and JavaScript elements, and there have been many general improvements that make it very flexible.

If you're really cutting edge, do the best of both worlds, and play with the RichFaces implementation that uses JSF2.0. Then you're really doing some kewl stuff!

If you want some really neat user interface stuff, and you want to learn something neat, I'd even suggest GWT. I love working with Google Web Toolkit.

Hey Cameron, Thanks for the reply. I will definitely pull the RichFaces 4.0 Alpha along with OpenFaces and give those a shot. I'll admit, I've been hesitant about using JSF in the past, but I have a lot of hope for JSF 2.0 and future iterations.

I did try GWT about a year or so ago on a project for work. We had a rather large project, and back then, ( I don't know about newer versions) the compile time on our UI was pretty insane. While it did make it to production, the next iteration was using Adobe Flex.

I will definitely look at JSF 2.0 and even GWT again and see how those work out.

Any other information and bits of advice you could provide me would also be appreciated.

Thanks again Cameron.