Presentation technologies

[Will Myers]

How do I choose which technology to use? The choice is basically JSP or JSF (I have experience with JSP but have never used JSF) so what are their respective strong and weak areas?

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

JSF is for component driven or rich internet applications

Note this answer is only for the exam. In real life there are many more choices of framework

[Yegor Bugayenko]

BTW, don't hesitate to mention in your assignment why are you suggesting to use JSP against JSF - because you don't have enough experience with JSF. It's totally OK. You, the architect, are not supposed to know everything. You are supposed to make the right choice in any circumstances.

[Jiafan Zhou]

I am wondering how many people here are in favour of Struts2 because of its popularity.

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Yegor,
Not having experience with a technology doesn't strike me as a good reason to not use it an exam. You don't have a real team. Presumably your developers have experience with JSF.

Jiafan,
I recommend posting that question as a new thread in the Struts forum.

[Jiafan Zhou]

Jeanne Boyarsky wrote:Yegor,
Jiafan,
I recommend posting that question as a new thread in the Struts forum.

Hi Jeanne,

Glad to see you answering my questions.

Actually I am asking this as a very specific question for SCEA exam. How many people taking the part2 of the SCEA exam choose the Struts as the presentation layer technology?

I know that Struts is a widely used Front Contoller framework in the industry for developing serious J2EE applications. People even use a nick name as "SSH", for "Struts, Spring and Hibernate".

Thanks

[Sharma Ashutosh]

I will suggest that you can talk about your SuD at the abstract level like MVC pattern and somewhere in the notes you can specify that one can use Struts framework as the MVC implementation at the time of low level design. Please make sure merely mentioning the framework is not enough-you need to provide the answer to "how" rather than just "what"

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Jiafan Zhou wrote:Actually I am asking this as a very specific question for SCEA exam. How many people taking the part2 of the SCEA exam choose the Struts as the presentation layer technology?

I know that Struts is a widely used Front Contoller framework in the industry for developing serious J2EE applications. People even use a nick name as "SSH", for "Struts, Spring and Hibernate".

Ah. I thought you were asking in general. For the exam, I would definitely not use Struts. This is an exam about the JEE platform, not about other open source libraries. I agree with the original poster that it should be JSP or JSF.

[Jiafan Zhou]

Jeanne Boyarsky wrote:

Jiafan Zhou wrote:Actually I am asking this as a very specific question for SCEA exam. How many people taking the part2 of the SCEA exam choose the Struts as the presentation layer technology?

I know that Struts is a widely used Front Contoller framework in the industry for developing serious J2EE applications. People even use a nick name as "SSH", for "Struts, Spring and Hibernate".

Ah. I thought you were asking in general. For the exam, I would definitely not use Struts. This is an exam about the JEE platform, not about other open source libraries. I agree with the original poster that it should be JSP or JSF.

The definition of Struts is as follows:
Struts is an Apache framework allowing a real distinction between the user interface and the business logic of a JEE software.

Struts (JSF similarly) provides a layer above Servlets, which is of course a JEE technology. The requirement mentions requiring JEE 5, I don't know any reasons why Struts2 cannot be used in this assignment. Plus I am not similar with JSF (I learned the basics of JSF to pass the part1 of the exam). Particularly, I haven't used JSF to develop any serious web applications.

Although SCEA is an exam for J2EE architects, Sun (or Oracle) seems mandating people to use JSP or JSF as the presentation layer technologies. But in the real life, I don't know anyone uses JSF to develop the web application. Anyway, if JSF or JSP should be used, I will go and quickly learn JSF and use that in the assignment, which is really an unnatural thing to do.

[Sharma Ashutosh]

The definition of Struts is as follows:
Struts is an Apache framework allowing a real distinction between the user interface and the business logic of a JEE software.

Struts (JSF similarly) provides a layer above Servlets, which is of course a JEE technology. The requirement mentions requiring JEE 5, I don't know any reasons why Struts2 cannot be used in this assignment. Plus I am not similar with JSF (I learned the basics of JSF to pass the part1 of the exam). Particularly, I haven't used JSF to develop any serious web applications.

I beleive here in this forum there will be hardly anybody who doesn't know Struts or worked with it. There are questions on JSF in part 1, i think you might have studied for part 1 also.

Although SCEA is an exam for J2EE architects, Sun (or Oracle) seems mandating people to use JSP or JSF as the presentation layer technologies. But in the real life, I don't know anyone uses JSF to develop the web application. Anyway, if JSF or JSP should be used, I will go and quickly learn JSF and use that in the assignment, which is really an unnatural thing to do.

You can take an analogy from the company where you are working and they have their technical stack already defined. Then you will using the tools and technologies from that stack only. I have seen many people passing the exam using frameworks like Struts, Spring, Hibernate etc...I myself has used some framework in my assignment. I believe what is required is that one need to specify the reasons of using the framework. Remember Cade has mentioned in his book-merely specifying the framework won't do, one has to specify how you are solving the particular business problem.

[Jiafan Zhou]

Sharma Ashutosh wrote:
I have seen many people passing the exam using frameworks like Struts, Spring, Hibernate etc...I myself has used some framework in my assignment. I believe what is required is that one need to specify the reasons of using the framework. Remember Cade has mentioned in his book-merely specifying the framework won't do, one has to specify how you are solving the particular business problem.

This is a very important piece of information, Thanks. I feel more confident to use Struts when being told that people who *did* use the Struts framework over JSF and indeed passed the exams. I can't agree more that in such case, a detailed reasons must be given why such decision is being made.

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Jiafan Zhou wrote:Anyway, if JSF or JSP should be used, I will go and quickly learn JSF and use that in the assignment, which is really an unnatural thing to do.

You don't have to know JSF well to do the design. Just at a high level.

[Sharma Ashutosh]

I agree with Jeanne. For part 1 and part 2- i went thru the Core JSF book first 5-6 chapters. I have created some very basic JSF applications following JEE tutorial-no real life project experience.
You need to know it conceptually with some basic concepts to design the solution for SCEA5 part 2.