Re: A Dialogue

albartell skrev den 26-09-2007 13:24:

In the same breath I would state that JSF will be around for awhile until it
outgrows the limited vision the original creators had (same story with
Struts). There will come a time when enough of the side open source
projects provide enough relevant success that Sun will start deprecating JSF
and go with the next thing.

(Found this in my drafts folder - sorry about the delay)

I'll only discuss JSF here as it is the only framework in this discussion with a specification behind it.
Well, we all learn. The idea with mingling code and HTML have shown not to scale well, in almost all those places I have looked.

The approach with use an abstract description in the JSP-page with tags and convert it in code to actual output is very sound. I think it will scale well given the right tag libraries and these can develop with time and be replaced.
I saw a demo at JAOO 2006 where the amount of work needed to add Ajax to a JSF-solution was a matter of adding tags to delimit the area updated by Ajax (so the whole page was not to be reloaded). The rest was unchanged. The learning curve is steep, but the view is good.

This is where Joe's approach to build your own is actually quite attractive.
I haven't lived through a lot of frameworks, but I have done JSF and
Tapestry. Both have significant lack of documentation, and both are
cumbersome to implement when you go outside of the box of what the creators
meant it to work with.

Building your own framework for Java is in my opinion a dead end. You have the complete burden of support - I would like to BET that it will have significant lack of documentation, and that it will be cumbersome for others to use too.
JSF has gotten something right, so I'd like to say that building a set of taglibs providing what you need instead of building from the ground up, will most likely be easier in the long run.

I would love to find a very light-weight framework for end-to-end Java that
was easy to use yet allowed you to break out of the framework when need be.
(75% of my Java coding doesn't have anything to do with the iSeries and thus
doesn't use RPG as the controller or model like Joe's).

Could you be more specific? What was it you needed to do?