Is Spring moving away from JSF integration support?

[shanocul]

What are your views on JSP vs JSF?

[Grzegorz Grzybek]

Hello:

My private opinion:

JSF: politicts, Ed Burns creating new JSRs alone, big Vendors (Oracle ADF), heavy, hard to debug, hard to maintain, cumbersome, hard to do easy things.

JSP: just one of "view template technologies".

So, View Template Technologies: (e.g., Thymeleaf): More natural in request-response nature of HTTP. Putting emphasis on controllers and logic invoked before moving to render phase. Natural templating (see Thymeleaf) - very helpful! Easy to debug, easy to maintain, easy to produce the desired effect (Thymeleaf!)

Also mind that after years of advocating ASP.NET Web Forms, Microsoft moves towards ASP.NET MVC with Razor views.

Personally I've tried to use JSF once (RichFaces). The goal was to let inexperienced developers to build views. But neither for them nor for me it was easy. After one attempt to create dynamic view with JSF (based on database configuration) I gave up. It was silly, ugly and slow.

JSPs are good, but have their drawbacks. So when performance is not an issue, I recommend something which is more like real templating (i.e. converting text file with placeholders and some markup/instructions to final html based on some arguments (model) passed to templating engine): Velocity, FreeMarker or Thymeleaf.

regards
Grzegorz Grzybek

[Phil Webb]

In my opinion JSF took a major leap forward with version 2.0 and contrary to Grzegorz I have found may tasks easier to achieve by using pre-built JSF components. I would recommend taking a look at PrimeFaces if you need a good rich component suite.

If you are interested in deeper JSF/Spring integration you could take a look at a side project that I have been working on for a while:

https://github.com/philwebb/springfaces/

and a series of blog posts:

http://coderphil.wordpress.com/categ...aserver-faces/


BTW: I have also heard very good things about Thymeleaf so I would recommend evaluating that if JSF does not meet your needs and you want to move away from JSPs

Cheers,
Phil.