ADF Faces goes open source
It's likely you originally heard about ADF Faces being donated open source way back in December 2005. Looks like it's finally happened. It's going to be tough for Tapestry and Wicket to compete with JSF when big companies are providing components for it. The after-market for a web framework can certainly influence decision-makers.
Re: competition. I don't care too much about competing with any framework. Sure, if JSF would have been better in a couple of ways, I wouldn't have bothered getting active for Wicket, and I feel strongly about how bad most model 2 frameworks are. But for the rest, Wicket has build up a pretty large community by now, and we're making a lot of people happy already - there are many reports of people delivering their production systems written in Wicket. And, probably most important, it scatches our own itch! I'm totally happy with how well things went with Wicket, and seeing the reasons people choose Wicket in the first place having a growing JSF is more an opportunity than a threat.
I know the availability of components is strong marketing wise - and we actually should make some more noise about the numerous components, internally and externally, we have, but it's partially a bogus argument too. The fact that famous company X brings out a set of components doesn't say much about their quality (no flame intended, I'm sure in this case they're good).
Furthermore, with Wicket it is extremely easy to create custom components. Meaning that you don't need as much prefab, and that the components there are, are very easy to extend. Take the example of a color picker. I'm sure it'll impress some people, but how useful is it? Wicket currently doesn't come with one, but if I need one, I'll code one in a few hours. That feels like having more power to me than having a lib that ships with one (of which it remains to be seen whether it does exactly what I want).
Finally, having ready-to-use components is only one part of the story of CBD. It's like looking at the collections lib. Very nice to have them, but often you want your own, domain specific datastructures, which may or may not build on top of those existing. That's why I want a framework which makes creating custom components just as easy as using them.
Well, that almost sounds like I'm defending here :). I just want to stress that the point of having alternative frameworks is not that one has to win, but that it caters to people with different goals, opinions and styles.
Posted by Eelco Hillenius on May 08, 2006 at 06:37 PM MDT #
Posted by Ron on May 11, 2006 at 02:25 AM MDT #