Merrill Higginson wrote:I can understand mixing frameworks if they each offer something different (Struts with Spring/Hibernate for example). What I don't understand is wanting to use two presentation frameworks such as JSF and Struts that both do the same job. As I see it this makes things unnecessarily complicated and gives you nothing in return. My advice is to pick a presentation framework and stick with it.
I know this is an old post but I just wanted to clarify in case anyone else ended up here like I did.
There is a big difference between JSF and Struts2. JSF and Struts2 are not really "presentation frameworks". JSF is a component based framework and struts2 is not.
The motivation for mixing struts2 with jsf/richfaces is to use ajax features of richfaces that run on top of the JSF component based framework. Struts2 is not a component based framework and there are no component tags for a rich user experience. If you want things like a calendar, tabs, sliders.... etc, you have to find them or make them yourself with javascript or something.
Since I think struts2 rocks and is better than JSF
, you can still use the struts2 framework with its cool interceptors and all, but integrate JSF components so you have access to richfaces nice ajax components.