Raible Designs

How do you choose web framework candidates to compare?

David Díaz Clavijo sent me an email a couple weeks ago asking me about comparing web frameworks. David is a computer engineering student at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC) in the Canary Islands, Spain. His FYP (Final Year Project) is a web frameworks comparison focused on high productivity frameworks. He's started a blog to help facilitate his work and has been writing some interesting posts.

Today, he wrote about the web frameworks he's decided to compare and inspired me to respond to his original request for my thoughts.

Hello David,

Sorry it took me so long to respond. I think your approach as far as learning the language, making exercises, learning the framework and developing the website is good. As you know, the last one you develop with will likely do well because you're repeated the steps so much with the other ones.

However, there's one thing I think you're doing wrong. In the real world, I don't believe that an architect would look at *all* the available web frameworks and choose one. I believe most of them already have a language bias or there's a target platform (e.g. LAMP, JVM, etc.).

I believe the majority of development happens today where a platform is already in place. Even moreso, the backend may already be in place and the company is simply trying to find a more productive front-end framework. In the first instance, where the platform is already chosen, the chooser's options are immediately limited. For example, if it's the JVM, Django might be eliminated because JPython isn't that up-to-snuff or widely used (this could be changing). However, it could be said that all the frameworks you've chosen (including Code Igniter) can run on the JVM.

I just don't see people identifying web frameworks across such a wide variety of languages. I think folks generally choose a platform, then a language, then a framework. It's possible that startups will do it differently by choosing a language first. However, I imagine most startups have a technical founder that already has some preference towards a particular language.

Now it's your turn, dear readers. Have you ever been in a situation where you've been able to pick a web framework across all languages? Did any of your biases enter into the equation?

How would you recommend David go about choosing web framework candidates?

Integrating GWT into AppFuse

I've been interested in integrating GWT into AppFuse ever since I blogged about it 4 years ago. A few months after that post, I wrote about Enhancing Evite.com with GWT and Grails. After Evite, I had a gig near Boston where I developed with GXT for the remainder of the year. When all was said and done, I ended up spending a year with GWT and really enjoyed my experience. I haven't used it much since.

GWT is scheduled to be integrated into AppFuse in version 4.0. That's quite a ways off. The good news is you might not have to wait that long, thanks to Iván García Sainz-Aja. Iván let us know about his work a couple weeks ago in an email to the appfuse-dev mailing list.

web/gwt> mvn -P gwtDebug -Dgwt.inplace=true gwt:compile jetty:run  

As you can imagine, I was very excited to hear about Iván's work. So I cloned his repo, built gwt-bootstrap locally and checked it out. Functionality wise, it was great! However, when I dug into the source code, I found a whole lotta code.

To see how the GWT flavor compared to the other implementations in AppFuse, I created a cloc report on the various web frameworks in AppFuse. I'm sure these reports could be adjusted to be more accurate, but I believe they give a good general overview. I posted some graphs that displays my findings in visual form.

When I sent this to the mailing list, Ivan responded that it was a lot of code and estimated 12 new files would be needed to CRUD an entity. This sure seems like a lot to me, but he defended this yesterday and noted that his implementation follows many of GWT's latest best practices: MVP pattern, Activities and Places, EventBus, Gin and Guice. He also shared a wiki page with explanations and diagrams of how things work.

The reason I'm writing this post is to get more feedback on this implementation. First of all, does GWT really require this much code? Secondly, are there other GWT implementations that reduce a lot of the boilerplate? SmartGWT, Vaadin* and Errai come to mind.

If you were starting a new GWT project and using AppFuse, how would you want it implemented?

* Vaadin 7 claims it can be used as a drop-in replacement for GWT. I tried replacing the gwt-servlet and gwt-user dependencies with Vaadin's, but it didn't work.

Switching AppFuse from MyFaces to PrimeFaces

When describing my bias against JSF back in November, I wrote:

... there's a lot of folks praising JSF 2 (and PrimeFaces moreso). That's why I'll be integrating it (or merging your pull request) into the 2.3 release of AppFuse. Since PrimeFaces contains a Bootstrap theme, I hope this is a pleasant experience and my overall opinion of JSF improves.

Shortly after the AppFuse 2.2.1 release in December, Gilberto Andrade contributed a sample project that used Mojarra (the JSF RI) and PrimeFaces instead of MyFaces and its Tomahawk components. Last week, I spent a few hours integrating Gilberto's changes into AppFuse's master branch. You can see all the changes I made (which include a Jetty plugin upgrade and some cleanup) in this Crucible review. Feel free to leave comments on ask questions in the review itself.

The first thing I noticed when integrating PrimeFaces is you have to add a custom repository in order to get its artifacts via Maven.

<repositories>
    <repository>
        <id>prime-repo</id>
        <name>Prime Repo</name>
        <url>http://repository.primefaces.org</url>
    </repository>
</repositories>

This is unfortunate since all of AppFuse's other dependencies can be found in Maven Central. It means that if you're using a JSF archetype, the PrimeFaces repo will be checked for artifacts first, causing an unnecessary slowdown in artifact resolution. I hope the PrimeFaces developers fix this soon.

While integrating these two frameworks, I ran into a number of issues.

• An IllegalStateException on startup when using "mvn jetty:run"
• Conditionally rendering a button disables its click-ability
• The PrimeFaces Bootstrap theme 404s on some images
• Canoo WebTest doesn't work with fileUpload nor to set checkbox values
• PrimeFaces resources served up at /javax.faces.resource/* not found

An IllegalStateException on startup when using "mvn jetty:run"
The first issue I encountered was that I was unable to run the app in Jetty. It worked fine in Tomcat but I got the following error in Jetty:

2013-01-31 22:28:07.683:WARN:/:unavailable
java.lang.IllegalStateException: Application was not properly initialized at startup, could not find Factory: javax.faces.context.FacesContextFactory
at javax.faces.FactoryFinder$FactoryManager.getFactory(FactoryFinder.java:951)
at javax.faces.FactoryFinder.getFactory(FactoryFinder.java:316)
at javax.faces.webapp.FacesServlet.init(FacesServlet.java:302)
at org.eclipse.jetty.servlet.ServletHolder.initServlet(ServletHolder.java:492)
at org.eclipse.jetty.servlet.ServletHolder.doStart(ServletHolder.java:312)

I found the fix for this on Stack Overflow and added the following listener to my web.xml to solve it.

<listener>
    <listener-class>com.sun.faces.config.ConfigureListener</listener-class>
</listener>

Conditionally rendering a button disables its click-ability
The next thing I noticed was the Delete button didn't work when editing a user. It was hidden correctly when adding a user, but clicking on it to delete a user simply refreshes the page. Below is the code I used successfully with MyFaces. For some reason, this doesn't work with PrimeFaces.

<c:if test="${not empty userForm.user.id}">
<h:commandButton value="#{text['button.delete']}" action="#{userForm.delete}"
    styleClass="btn" onclick="return confirmMessage(msgDelConfirm)"/>
</c:if>

I also tried the following, but no dice. This is currently an open issue.

<h:commandButton rendered="${not empty userForm.user.id}" value="#{text['button.delete']}" 
    action="#{userForm.delete}" styleClass="btn" onclick="return confirmMessage(msgDelConfirm)"/>

The PrimeFaces Bootstrap theme 404s on some images
After integrating PrimeFaces' Bootstrap theme, the following error shows up in server logs.

[INFO] [talledLocalContainer] Feb 02, 2013 10:40:25 PM com.sun.faces.application.resource.ResourceHandlerImpl logMissingResource
[WARNING] [talledLocalContainer] WARNING: JSF1064: Unable to find or serve resource, images/ui-bg_highlight-hard_70_000000_1x100.png, from library, primefaces-bootstrap.

This seems to have happened before in previous releases and is currently an open issue.

Canoo WebTest doesn't work with fileUpload nor to set checkbox values
We use Canoo WebTest to run integration tests on the UI in AppFuse. For some reason, performing file uploads and setting checkbox values works fine with MyFaces/Tomahawk, but not with Mojarra/PrimeFaces. I'm not sure if this is caused by the JSF core or the component library, but it remains an open issue. For now, I've just commented out the parts of tests that used to do this.

On a related note, getting the real path of a resource from the ServletContext worked fine before the switch, but results in a null value now.

String uploadDir = getServletContext().getRealPath("/resources") + "/" + request.getRemoteUser() + "/";

PrimeFaces resources served up at /javax.faces.resource/* not found
While I didn't have problems with this in AppFuse, I did encounter it in AppFuse Light. I don't know why there was a difference between the two, but it turned out to be caused by the UrlRewriteFilter and my desire for extensionless URLs. The outbound-rule to strip .xhtml from URLs was the culprit. Adding a condition to it solved the problem. Yeah, the condition seems backwards, but it works.

<outbound-rule match-type="regex">
    <condition type="query-string" operator="equal">ln=primefaces</condition>
    <from>^(.*)\.xhtml(\?.*)?$</from>
    <to last="false">$1$2</to>
</outbound-rule>

Summary
The initial switch to Mojarra/PrimeFaces was pretty easy thanks to Gilberto's sample project. However, the small issues encountered after that turned out to be quite frustrating and you can see that several are still not fixed. I guess it just goes to show that not all web frameworks are perfect. Hopefully we'll get these minor issues fixed before the next release. In the meantime, you can checkout the updated demos for AppFuse JSF and AppFuse Light JSF.

What's the best way to compare JVM Web Frameworks?

I've been comparing web frameworks ever since 2004. It was the first time I'd ever proposed a talk for a conference. ApacheCon was in Vegas that year and my buddy Bruce suggested I speak at it. I submitted the talk, got accepted and went to work learning the frameworks I was talking about. At the time, I had a lot of Struts experience and I'd made a good living learning it, consulting on it and blogging about it. However, there was a new kid on the block (Spring MVC) that was garnishing attention and some other frameworks (WebWork and Tapestry) that had a lot of high praise from developers. I was inspired to learn why so many people hated Struts.

Fast forward 8 years and I'm still comparing web frameworks. Why? Because there still seems to be a large audience that's interested in the topic. Witness InfoQ's Top 20 JVM Web Frameworks, which was one of their most-read articles for two months in a row. One of the beauties of the Java Community is that it's very diverse. There's tons of folks that are part of this community and, like it or not, several folks that are former Java Developers. However, these developers still seem to maintain an interest in the community and it's still one of the largest pools of talent out there. Java is still quite viable and only seems to be getting better with age.

So the topic of web frameworks on the JVM is still hot, and I still like to write about it. For those of you still enthusiastic about the topic, you're in luck. The two best websites for the Java Community, InfoQ and DZone (formerly Javalobby) are still very interested in the topic too!

2012 - A Year in Review

I wrote my first year in review blog entry way back in 2005. That means this year's is number 8. Since they keep getting longer every year, I figured I'd try something different this year and use sections similar to Remy Sharp.

• Professional
  • Business
  • Speaking
  • Projects
• Personal
• 2013

Professional

I spent the entirety of the year with one client: Taleo. Oracle bought them in February. In June, the transition to Oracle happened. My tasks and projects haven't changed much since the transition, but it has been a real pain to get paid on time. My contract with them is through the end of May. I hope to take July off (to get married) and August off (to honeymoon) and start a new gig in September.

I did minimal Java work throughout the year and spent most of my time doing CSS and JavaScript. I love doing front-end work much more than back-end, so day-to-day, it was very satisfying.

AppFuse 2.2.1 Released!

The AppFuse Team is pleased to announce the release of AppFuse 2.2.1. This release includes upgrades to all dependencies to bring them up-to-date with their latest releases. Most notable are Hibernate 4, Struts 2.3.7, Apache CXF 2.7.0 and Spring Security 3.1.3. In addition, we've integrated HTML5, Twitter Bootstrap, jQuery and replaced Compass with Hibernate Search. Last but not least, we've added full support for Java 7 and integrated many security improvements. For more details on specific changes see the release notes.

What is AppFuse?
AppFuse is a full-stack framework for building web applications on the JVM. It was originally developed to eliminate the ramp-up time when building new web applications. Over the years, it has matured into a very testable and secure system for creating Java-based webapps.

Demos for this release can be viewed at http://demo.appfuse.org. Please see the QuickStart Guide to get started with this release.

A number of blog posts were written about features that went into this release while it was being developed:

• Improving AppFuse's PageSpeed with Apache
• New Liquibase and wro4j Tutorials from J. García
• AppFuse News: GitHub, Hibernate Search and The Future
• Refreshing AppFuse's UI with Twitter Bootstrap
• Upgrading AppFuse to Spring Security 3.1 and Spring 3.1
• Integrating OAuth with AppFuse and its REST API

If you have questions about AppFuse, please read the FAQ or join the mailing list. If you find any issues, please report them on the users mailing list.

Thanks to everyone for their help contributing patches, writing documentation and participating on the mailing lists.

We greatly appreciate the help from our sponsors, particularly Atlassian, Contegix and JetBrains. We highly recommend using the new IntelliJ IDEA 12 for developing web applications.

November Travels to Kauai and Wenatchee

For the last two Novembers, we've celebrated Abbie's birthday, watched the Broncos beat the Chiefs and then headed to Antwerp, Belgium for Devoxx.

2010 was awesome. 2011 was even better.

This year, we chose to celebrate my parent's 40th wedding anniversary instead. It wasn't a hard choice, since they chose Hawaii as their destination of choice. After visiting last year and this summer, we're pretty much in when anyone suggests Hawaii. We got our flights for $10, rented an awesome beach-front house and had a great time with my parents and sisters.

Below was the view from our backyard.

The purpose of this post is to 1) show off some of Trish's spectacular photos and 2) tell you a bit about what we enjoyed.

First of all, the location was fantastic. If you get a chance to stay at Nani Nani Hale, I highly recommend it. We could walk to the beach in seconds and spent a few hours each day on the lanai, enjoying each other's company, playing games, napping and reading. The sunsets were spectacular.

We felt like we never had to leave and really enjoyed the relaxing atmosphere.

We did a lot of surfing; almost every day.

It was awesome seeing my parents so happy after all these years.

And it was great spending so much time with my family and their long-time friends Mike and Mai from Montana.

Thanksgiving in Wenatchee
We flew back from Hawaii on Monday, November 19th. A red eye brought us to Denver, where we picked up Abbie and Jack and headed to Washington on Wednesday.

My sister and her wife recently moved from Chelan to Wenatchee and Thanksgiving at their house was the name of the game. My parents were already there, since they started their journey to Hawaii from Seattle. We rented another nice VRBO and enjoyed ourselves while cooking, watching football, playing games, hot-tubbing and watching movies.

I love Trish's panorama of Wenatchee in the early morn.

The kids had fun...

As for the adults? I'll let the photo speak for itself.

For more pictures, see Trish's Kauai 2012 and Wenatchee 2012 albums.

Improving AppFuse's PageSpeed with Apache

One of the most important things when developing webapps is to make them fast. With AppFuse, we've tried to incorporate many of the 14 rules for faster-loading websites. We had a gzip filter before it was cool (2003) and replaced it with the one from EhCache. However, users experienced issues with both of these, both with XFire/CXF and WebWork/Struts 2 and JSPs. Because of these issues, we disabled gzipping a few releases ago.

This article is designed to show you how you can make your AppFuse webapp faster, without modifying any code. The good news is this applies to any webapp that you can deploy behind Apache.

Last Friday, I sent an email to the good folks at Contegix to see if they could install mod_pagespeed on the Apache server that sits in front of *.appfuse.org. My goal was to improve the YSlow and PageSpeed scores of the apps hosted on demo.appfuse.org. I discovered they were getting a dismal score of 24 and figured we could do a lot better. mod_pagespeed speeds up your site and reduces page load time by automatically applying web performance best practices. It seemed like an easy solution.

Unfortunately, we were unable to use mod_pagespeed. From the guys at Contegix:

Attempting to install mod_pagespeed as you requested, we find that it requires Apache httpd 2.2 and libstdc++ 4.1.2, both of which are unsupported in RHEL4. To get mod_pagespeed to work on your present operating system basically means re-rolling the core components, which would make them unsupported. I'm afraid mod_pagespeed is simply not an option on your present configuration.

Since I still wanted to improve performance, I opted for another route instead: using mod_deflate (for gzipping) and mod_expires (for expires headers). I also turned on KeepAlive as recommended by PageSpeed Insights.

mod_deflate
mod_deflate was already installed in Apache (version 2.0.52), so all I had to do was configure it. On RHEL4, Apache is installed at /etc/httpd and there's a conf.d directory that contains all the configuration files. I created a file at /etc/httpd/conf.d/deflate.conf and populated it with the following:

#
# mod_deflate configuration
#
<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
    SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
    
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain text/html text/xml text/css application/xml application/xhtml+xml application/rss+xml application/javascript application/x-javascript
    
    DeflateCompressionLevel 9
    
    BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
    BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
    BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
    
    DeflateFilterNote Input instream
    DeflateFilterNote Output outstream
    DeflateFilterNote Ratio ratio
    
    LogFormat '"%r" %{outstream}n/%{instream}n (%{ratio}n%%)' deflate
    
</IfModule>

At first, I had separate lines for all the different content types (as recommended by this article). The Contegix support crew figured out the solution (everything needed to be on one line) in 14 minutes, updated the config and verified it worked using an http compression testing page.

mod_expires
mod_expires was already installed, so I added a config file at /etc/httpd/conf.d/expires.conf. I used this howto and asked Contegix for help when it didn't work. Their response took quite a bit longer this time (49 minutes), but they once again figured it out:

It appears that FilesMatch does not like to play will JkMount. It does work using content type.

My final config for expires.conf:

<IfModule mod_expires.c>
    ExpiresActive On
    
    <FilesMatch "\.(jpe?g|png|gif|js|css)$">
        ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 week"
    </FilesMatch>
    
    ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 week"
    ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 week"
    ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 week"
    ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 week"
    ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 1 week"
    ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 1 week"
</IfModule>

I used "1 week" because we're changing things quite a bit right now and we haven't integrated resource fingerprinting yet.

KeepAlive
The last thing I did to improve performance was to turn on KeepAlive by editing /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf and changing Off to On.

#
# KeepAlive: Whether or not to allow persistent connections (more than
# one request per connection). Set to "Off" to deactivate.
#
KeepAlive On

Summary
As a result of these changes, our PageSpeed score went from 24 to 96 and YSlow went from a 90 to a 98. When I started this experiment, I was only trying to fix demo.appfuse.org. However, it also improved the speed of all the other *.appfuse.org sites, including Confluence, Bamboo, JIRA and FishEye. Thanks for all the help Contegix! There's a good chance you've given me back a few minutes in each day.

Originally posted on the AppFuse Blog.

The Well-Grounded Java Developer Book Review

After finishing Core HTML5 Canvas, I dived into the next book on my list: The Well-Grounded Java Developer by Ben Evans and Martijn Verburg. I've known about this book since April of last year when I received an email from Martijn. He wanted to use some of my graphs and research on JVM Web Frameworks as evidence that many frameworks aren't meeting developer's needs and to support their coverage of Grails in the book.

I agreed and also did a quick review on Chapter 13, Rapid Web Development. In June of this year, I received another email saying the book was done and they'd send me a free copy. I received the book in early August, but didn't start reading it until mid September.

• Developing with Java 7
• Vital techniques
• Polyglot programming on the JVM
• Crafting the polyglot project

Developing with Java 7
The first two chapters on Java 7 and NIO.2 (aka JSR-203) were great in that I started learning new things immediately. While I knew about most of the changes (strings in switch statements, improved exception handling, try-with-resources, diamond syntax, etc.), it was a nice refresher and motivated me to install Java 7 and start using it on a daily basis. The NIO.2 chapter covers the new filesystem support with Path, the Files helper class and Asynchronous I/O.

It was around this same time that I started on Coursera's Functional Programming Principles in Scala. I quickly realized the course was going to take quite a bit of my free time (5-7 hours per week). It was a good challenge to try and read for 30 minutes a day as well as stay on top of my Scala homework. However, it was also highly rewarding in all the knowledge I received in the last two months.

Vital techniques
This section covers Dependency Injection, Concurrency, Class files, and Bytecode and Performance Tuning. I skimmed through the DI chapter but slowed down to try and get my head around concurrency. Then I thanked my lucky stars I haven't had to deal with it much. I found the class files and bytecode chapter mildly interesting but perked up again to learn more about how to do performance tuning, VisualVM, and the new G1 garbage collector.

Polyglot programming on the JVM
The polyglot programming section was largely a reinforcement of my existing knowledge since I've used Groovy and Scala quite a bit. The chapter on Clojure was an eye-opener since I hadn't used Clojure before. I wasn't quite convinced of its merits, but I did learn enough to read and understand its syntax. Reading the Scala chapter while doing the Coursera course made me realize that Ben and Martijn really packed a lot into each language's chapter. This section is really a great intro to all these languages, especially if you've never worked with them before.

Crafting the polyglot project
While the final section was good, I learned the least in this section. While the concepts discussed in this section are important, they're also things I've been using for years: TDD, CI, and Rapid Web Development (with Grails). This section touched on Hibernate when discussing TDD and I thought to myself - it's strange they don't have cover Hibernate (or JPA) as part of being a well-grounded Java developer. My guess is the authors assumed most Java devs already know it.

The final chapter had a lot of tips on staying well-grounded (what's coming in Java 8, how the JVM is supporting polyglot programming, future concurrency trends, and new directions in the JVM).

I really enjoyed this book and feel I became a more knowledgeable Java developer by reading it. It contained a lot of high-level concepts as well as nitty-gritty details. In my opinion, the sign of a great book is one that you feel you'll refer back to as a reference guide. The first half of this book definitely feels like something I'll refer back to. The second half I'll recommend to Java developers wanted to get caught up with the latest trends.

Nice work Ben and Martijn!

Why the bias against JSF?

In my last post about InfoQ's Top 20 Web Frameworks for the JVM, I received a thought-provoking comment from henk53:

There is one little thing that does bother me in those presentations, and that's your fairly obvious bias against JSF.
...
If you are presenting yourself as, more or less, an authority on comparing web frameworks, then having a fairly obvious biased against one of them is just peculiar. I, all of my team, and various clients distrust your ranking of JSF. We do look at your data if the choice is between other frameworks, but as soon as JSF comes into the picture we just look elsewhere.

I'm not really sure where this bias comes from. Yes, JSF 1.0 sucked and 1.2 was only marginally better, but 2.0 is really cool and productive and there are SUPERB component and utility libraries now like PrimeFaces and OmniFaces. As a researcher of this topic I think you should keep up the date and not stick to some old grudge.

This is true, I am biased against JSF. It all started with my first JSF experience back in August 2004. If you remember correctly, 2004 was a big year: JSF 1.0, Spring 1.0 and Flex 1.0 were all released. The "AJAX" term was coined in early 2005.

By 2007 and 2008, JSF still hadn't gotten any better. In late 2009, JSF 2.0 was released and I upgraded in March 2011. As you can see from the aforementioned post, I ran into quite a few issues upgrading. JSF was also the hardest one to get working with extension-less URLs.

Most of my issues with JSF come from having maintained an application built with it since 2004. If I were to start a new application without any legacy migration issues, I imagine it wouldn't be as difficult. However, if you compare it to Struts 2 and Spring MVC, I've had little-to-no issues upgrading those applications over the years.

Also, I'm not just biased against JSF, but most component-based web frameworks. Just ask the Tapestry and Wicket folks. They've felt my criticisms over the years. My reason for preferring request-based frameworks like Struts 2/Spring MVC and Grails/Play has been because I've never seen the appeal in component-based frameworks. Often I've found that their components are just widgets that you can get from any decent JavaScript framework. And chances are that JavaScript framework can work with any web framework. Also, I've worked on a lot of high-traffic web applications that require statelessness for scalability.

I see the value in component-based frameworks, I just don't think components should be authored on the server-side. Most of the Java-based component frameworks require 2+ files for components (one for the component, one for the view, possibly one for the config). I love GWT's component concept in that you can just extract a class and re-use it. With JS frameworks, you can often just include a script. These days, when I think of good component-based frameworks, I think of jQuery UI and Twitter Bootstrap.

All that being said, there's a lot of folks praising JSF 2 (and PrimeFaces moreso). That's why I'll be integrating it (or merging your pull request) into the 2.3 release of AppFuse. Since PrimeFaces contains a Bootstrap theme, I hope this is a pleasant experience and my overall opinion of JSF improves.

In other component-based frameworks in AppFuse news, Tapestry 5 has gotten really fast in the last year. I imagine this is because we have a Tapestry expert, Serge Eby, working on it. And we're planning on adding Wicket in the 2.3 release.

So even though I prefer request-based frameworks with REST support and Bootstrap, that doesn't mean everyone does. I'll do my best to be less-biased in the future. However, please remember that my view on web frameworks is as a developer, not an analyst. And aren't developers supposed to be opinionated?