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Tuesday April 19, 2005

JSF needs better tools

In general, I don't like the fact that JSF is designed for tools vendors. However, after seeing a Visual Studio .NET 2005 demo - I can understand why that's Sun's motivation. Visual Studio is *very* cool and seems to greatly simplify ASP.NET development. That's why it's disturbing to see Why do JSF tools suck so bad?.

If the JSF Tools are going to suck (compared to Visual Studio), why don't we just make it more developer-friendly (instead of being so tools-friendly)? Of course, the better solution is to make the tools better, but that doesn't seem to be happening. Maybe we should just try to get Visual Studio to support JSF. ;-)

Posted in Java at Apr 19 2005, 09:38:07 AM MDT 14 Comments
Comments:

Hate to disagree, as you make a good point, but I am one of those folks who could use a tools-friendly package...

I am a newcomer to JSF - a few months ago, I bought the O'Reilly JavaServer Faces book and have done my fair share of tutorials at Sun's website and others. The language has yet to really "click" for me and that's disappointing + frustrating. I come from a ColdFusion background and JSF seemed like a smart step forward, as the tag-based (mostly) markup is similar to CFML - something that's always eluded me with PHP or JSP. I was, and still am, excited about JSF. I just wish I could get some help from a good IDE!

I've had a copy of Creator for OS X installed since the day it came out, but the interface is, well, dodgy and inconsistent. After playing around with Visual Studio for a bit, I came to realize just how rudimentary Creator really is - VS is just so much more polished and refined. I would absolutely love it if a solid drag and drop IDE became available for JSF as it would really help me learn the language in the limited time I have to do so. I'd then be able to learn from the code it produces and down the road, write my own by hand. But as of currently, I'm just left with Creator which is plenty intimidating and confusing for a motivated beginner like myself.

geof

Posted by Geof Harries on April 19, 2005 at 04:28 PM MDT #

Funny thing is, Apple's WebObjects is exactly this. While it pains me to recommend it as it is a single-vendor solution, I have yet to see any tools in the Java world that match the ease of development of WebObjects. I've used WebObjects and so far only played with JSF and JSF is extremely painful in comparison.

Posted by Marc Tremblay on April 19, 2005 at 04:39 PM MDT #

Matt, I would like to give JSF a shot. I think have read enough of "opinionated blogs." Is there any resource in "developer notebook" format that can walk a *Strutter* thru JSF step by step, side by side? What tool/setup would you suggest for this learning excercise?

Posted by Chakra Yadavalli on April 19, 2005 at 04:41 PM MDT #

It's me again. Just checked your AppFuse framework. Looks like ver 1.7 has JSF+Spring+Hibernate. Do you have any tutorials as well? please let me know.

Posted by Chakra on April 19, 2005 at 04:45 PM MDT #

Chakra - yep, there are tutorials on the wiki. There's also a more detailed tutorial on using JSF+Spring in Chapter 11 of Spring Live. If you're digging into AppFuse, I'd recommend getting the latest version from CVS. I hope to finish up 1.8 today and release it - the stuff in CVS is mostly final code.

Posted by Matt Raible on April 19, 2005 at 05:25 PM MDT #

If you need cheap drag&drop tools then new Sun Studio Creator (available thru update manager in earlier versions; it supports flow layout now) is the tool you need. Personally I prefer Eclipse 3.1M5 + FacesIDE (only simple source editor for jsf files with code completion; http://amateras.sourceforge.jp/cgi-bin/fswiki_en/wiki.cgi?page=FacesIDE )

There is also nice d&d support for JSF in latest preview release of Oracle JDeveloper, IBM WSAD also have d&d JSF support built it.

As you can see -- the tools are there, of course they aren't free (just like VS.NET; and some of them also ties you to 'one vendor' :-/).

As of tutorials/articles -- just look at jsfcentral.com in articles section.

Posted by Adam Kruszewski on April 19, 2005 at 06:21 PM MDT #

Adam--re: As you can see -- the tools are there

Are they there? Have you tried those tools vs .NET?

Posted by Matthew Payne on April 19, 2005 at 06:43 PM MDT #

Matthew--re: Unfortunetly -- actually I'm using _almost_exluisevely_ VS.net 2003 (project req.) and I must say that Eclipse + facesIDE (I'm a 'codemonkey' style guy) feels alot better to me (VS.net intellisense is just crap, d&d editor for asp.net is nothing more than frontpage wrapped with .net [which was a little surprise for me], and with nice autocompletion I'm quicker than this d&d editor, and page centric controller orientation of asp.net maybe is powerful but in 90% cases is rather productivity limitation than helper) :-/

Of course I can't speak for whidbey/.net 2.0 because it can't be used in production.

Visual/d&d tools are nice when you look at presentations, but overally they are PITA (just look for JDeveloper+ADF components demos at OTN -- they produce CRUD applications with reports/charts _without_ writing a line of code; but try to modify that later...)

Of course those are only my personal opinions. ;-)

Posted by Adam Kruszewski on April 19, 2005 at 08:22 PM MDT #

Chakra, I found O'Reily's JavaServer Faces to be a good guide to JSF. They explain how things fit together at the file level rather than assuming you'll be using Creator.

Posted by Marc Tremblay on April 20, 2005 at 03:36 AM MDT #

I don't like DnD tools. I prefer to do it by hand. When I used Swing (in the past), I never used DnD tools. Drag and Drop (DnD) is for some folks. I have not tried Sun's JSF dev tool. I did try IBM's JSF dev tool (WSAD).

Posted by Rick Hightower on April 21, 2005 at 07:31 AM MDT #

There are tools like the .NET stuff; IBM's Rational Aplication Developer 6.0. We're using it very successfully on a multi million dollar project. I agree, an open source version would be nice. In the mean while, check out IRAD 6.0.

Posted by hgrongstad on April 23, 2005 at 08:33 PM MDT #

Thanks for all of the details on DnD tools. I'll check them out...

geof

Posted by Geof Harries on April 26, 2005 at 07:24 PM MDT #

[Trackback] I was attending a class on writing application for ArcGIS Server with Java. It was great to be in the class, and it's really shaping up nicely. Dave Cardella is really doing a nice job putting it together. There is a lot of information to synthesize an...

Posted by My Own Little World on April 27, 2005 at 02:37 AM MDT #

I am surprised at people who says that 'i prefer to do it by hand'. As a developer we are creating applications with better interfaces and telling our end users to use it on the pretext that it makes their life easier. But in the same breath we will say 'I will not use DnD, WYSIWYG' I am coming from a 4GL background (without much java skills) and is now using Jdevloper and ADF and that specific tool had help us in building many applications, with almost the same speed of 4GL tools. I think without its IDE's DnD and WYSIWYG features we would have been nowhere.

Posted by Regee Chacko on August 11, 2008 at 05:10 AM MDT #

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