Comparing the Big 5 Web Frameworks
My session at ApacheCon is titled Comparing Web Frameworks: Struts, Spring MVC, WebWork, Tapestry & JSF. I have to turn in my presentation by Friday. The purpose of this post is to get your feedback and see what you'd like to see in such a talk. Here's the abstract:
This session is designed to explore the popular Java web frameworks. It will briefly explain how each one works and the strengths and weaknesses of each. Tips, tricks and gotcha's will be plentiful. A simple web application will be dissected and the different options will be compared. Lastly, it will provide attendees with a sample app they can download that has options to use any of the frameworks described.
The simple webapp is MyUsers from Spring Live. As part of my gig with Open Logic this summer, I wrote a number of sample apps using Equinox. Among these where 1) a Mavenized version, 2) a Tapestry version, 3) a JSF version, and 4) WebWork version. The Struts and Spring MVC versions were already done as part of the book. They agreed to let me use the code and knowledge from that experience. This is all to say it shouldn't be too hard to create the sample app for this talk.
The hard part is going to be talking about things that developers care about. In my post on JSF a while back, I noted the things I typically want in my webapps. The following topics might make good points of discussion.
- A sortable/pageable list of data. It's possible, but you have to add special sorting logic for each class. JSP already has this with the display tag - I'd simply like to be able to use it in JSF.
- Bookmarkability. Container managed authentication gives us a great way to offer users the ability to bookmark pages. If everything is a POST with JSF, we lose this ability. Sure there's the HTMLOutputLink, but if we can't invoke actions, what good is it?
- Clean and easy to read validation messages. The validation messages in both MyFaces and Sun's RI are not something you'd deliver to customers. What's wrong with making clean messages out-of-the-box? Tapestry seems to have no problems doing this. All the other MVC frameworks make you specify your own - which is fine with me.
- Easy cancelling and multi-button form handling. JSF does this well - better than the rest I'd say.
- Easy testability. Because of the plethora of JavaScript, JSF apps are difficult to test with tools like jWebUnit and Canoo's WebTest. Don't get me wrong, I love JavaScript - but an application should be able to be tested w/o it.
- Success Messages. JSF does success messages OK - it's a pity it's not easier to get a resource bundle and it's a shame that you can't escape HTML in the <h:messages> tag. This seems like an oversight to me.
I could do a number of slides and show how each framework handles the above situations. Other topics that would be worthwhile would be:
- Model in View - can you use your model objects to back forms or do you have to use something like ActionForms?
- Spring Integration - all of them have this. This would merely be a discussion on how its handled.
- Validation - how robust and/or extensible is it? How hard is it to do chained validation? What about client-side validation? Is the client-side stuff immature like WebWork's?
- Internationalization - how is it done and how hard is it to get messages in your classes? JSF sucks at this.
- The Duplicate Post Problem - how does it handle duplicate posts. Not the "push the submit button twice" but the "hit refresh after saving" kind. Tapestry fails this test.
- Page Decoration - SiteMesh can be used for all frameworks, Tiles for some. Discuss how much easier it is to use SiteMesh.
- Tools - since some frameworks have tools to help ease there development and others don't.
- Business/Marketing - how well known is the framework and will your skills be marketable if you learn it? JSF and Struts are in high demand. Tapestry is virtually unheard of. WebWork is for the evil few (heh!) and Spring MVC is the new kid on the block.
Whaddya think - what is so special about your framework that'll make it look better in my talk? What are the things that suck that I can bash on? If you're a committer on one of these frameworks - are you going to be at ApacheCon? I'd love to have some folks defend their projects after I'm done ripping on them. 
If I don't rip on yours, then you can bask in all its glory.
If you live in Denver, I'll be delivering this presentation at DJUG's Architecture SIG on November 3rd.