« Booting from my iPod | Main | Test driving the new... »
20030917 Wednesday September 17, 2003

JSF: Allows WebWork style Actions Am I working too late or does JSF allow a WebWork style Action? According to this post, you can have your properties and your logic in the same class (like WebWork). Also, no more worrying about BeanUtils.copyProperties()?

Struts encourages you to use Strings for field values that might need conversion, in order to redisplay correctly in case of conversion errors. You don't need to worry about that with JavaServer Faces, because the redisplay is handled by the components themselves. You will generally use the native data types for your field properties.

Regardless of what the WW Developers say, I think I'm gonna dig Java Server Faces. Posted in Java at Sep 17 2003, 07:03:34 PM MDT 5 Comments

Comments:

The WW guys talk shit about everything that's not WW, so I don't even bother with their opinions about server side stuff any more. That said, JSF is freakin' frightening. I tried to grok it by downloading the Web Services pack and checking it out, but just the XML config document is beyond comprehension. They're trying to compete with Microsoft instead of trying to solve a problem and are creating a monster instead of a clean solution. -Russ

Posted by Russ on September 18, 2003 at 05:18 AM MDT #

I agree that the XML config file is hideous, and that the JSP tags/syntax are even worse. I believe that Sun is planning on making up for this by getting a lot of support from the tools vendors (or their own: Rave) to make JSF drag-n-drop development. This sucks IMO b/c I've never liked drag and drop development.

Posted by Matt Raible on September 18, 2003 at 06:22 AM MDT #

I'm working my way through the 500+ page spec and I like what I see. I'm not done, but it appears to me that the UI component concept in JSF is a great improvement over plain old Web MVC frameworks like Struts and Webwork. I think you are correct: the form bean concept goes away. If Sun gets support from the tool vendors, that will be great, but one of the goals of the spec is to allow JSF development without any tools (other than your favorite code editor). If JSF succeeds, we'll see libraries of JSF UI components that can be used with any JSF implementation - and, so far, I don't see why both Struts and Webwork can take advantage of this by providing implementations of JSF.

Posted by Dave Johnson on September 18, 2003 at 07:01 AM MDT #

I never said there isn't something to like with JSF... I'm concerned with the same things you are. I don't want to be required to use a GUI builder for it... I'm also concerned about the performance of a system which does so many roundtrips and so much processing per request. It should be possible for us to integrate WebWork with JSF the same way Craig did for Struts, and I'll probably get around to that at some point.

Posted by Jason Carreira on September 18, 2003 at 07:45 AM MDT #

If that is what you are interested in, you might want to look at a project Lars Hoss and I are working on: Struts Action Invocation Framework (http://struts.sf.net/saif). Basically, it seeks to combine WW2/XWork ideas regarding action handling with Struts 1.1+. We will have the first release out in the next few days.

Posted by Don Brown on September 18, 2003 at 10:57 AM MDT #

Post a Comment:
  • HTML Syntax: Allowed
Click me to subscribe
Matt Raible is a Web Architecture Consultant specializing in open source frameworks.
« May 2012
SunMonTueWedThuFriSat
  
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
  
       
Today

Recent Entries

Tag Cloud

abbie appfuse denver flex grails gwt hibernate jack java jsf linkedin maven myfaces rails roller skiing softwaresummit spring springmvc struts2 tapestry travel vacation webframeworks wicket