posted 11 years ago
Indeed, JSF has become a mature technology and is the number one choice for many EE applications these days. There are still a lot of enemies, which is not surprising given the problems of early versions. But I enjoy working with it and I see very few reasons left to develop a new application using Servlets&JSP's, other than statelessness and pure performance. Also, don't let people convince you that Swing is deprecated, or out of date. It is definitely not so. However, these days there are a number of frameworks that facilitate/improve Swing development (check out the NetBeans Platform, for example).
As far as the mobile tier is concerned, JSF is a very good, standardized option to create Web applications with a mobile front-end. However, there are other valid options in that style, such as GWT(client) or Vaadin(server), or one of the quickly emerging JavaScript-based fat browser client web frameworks. The basic question to ask yourself if you want to choose between these frameworks, is how much you aspire to do on the client, and how much on the server. JavaFX, with its 3D viewroot, to my eyes only becomes a real contender if the SuD has the highest graphic richness in view requirements, and/or if you have the development resource potential to provide that richness.
The Architect Certification is not made with any specific view technology in mind, the idea is that you have to be able to design a SuD and choose the right technologies for the given scenario, no matter which technologies those are. Make sure you're making your choice based on the right criteria and not just using JavaFX as a Golden Hammer.
Oracle Certified Professional: Java SE 6 Programmer && Oracle Certified Expert: (JEE 6 Web Component Developer && JEE 6 EJB Developer)