I've recently been thrown into using Visual Studio.net, and while I don't particularly like Mircosoft products (I left MS when DCOM and COM+ came out; I don't care what Don Box says, it is a poor architecture), I must admit the ease of designing web pages in such an
IDE is thought provoking.
While I admit such page design tools have been around for about 4-5 years now, my question is, is anybody working on a new form of
JSF where a gui is involved, that binds
Java classes to a drag and drop drawing page, similar to the one found in Visual Studio.net?
It seems to me the problem with
JSP, JSF and
Struts in their current format, your relegated to a text editor for what is a visual component your trying to build. Even if all you're displaying on a page is text, it's still a visual component.
I like Java, it's a clean, relatively simple OO language, and I like it very much, but the tools available really blow. Your back to writng everything in a glorified text editor, and then complie it and hope it works.
Perhaps such Java s/w tools are already out there and I don't now, but
this 'cottage industry' approach to building web applications, such as hand coding every page using JSPs, JSF, and oh yes, the Java action classes as in Struts in a text editor, does not have the muscle for the size of web applications that will be built in the future.
The potential is so great for annotations in Java 1.5 that I think JSF needs to move into the direction of a full blown web development tool, rather than just a framework for linking ui components.
-Jeff Walker