JSF in the Web tier

[debasishg]

I have been doing some fact finding on using JSF in the Web tier. Found some examples and articles, but could not really converge to a decision.

Will be using Spring 2.0 (who doesn't ? ) all over - hence the following questions arise :-

a) How mature is the integration of Spring 2.0 with JSF managed beans ? I remember I saw some part of it broken in one of the Spring One presentations by Colin Sampaleanu.

b) Should I use Spring managed beans injected as services into JSF managed beans in faces-config.xml OR totally do away with JSF managed beans and have Spring beans directly in faces-config.xml ? I am not sure if the latter is possible or not though.

c) Integration of JSF and SWF. I like SWF a lot and would not give it up just for using JSF. But with JSF being at a higher level of abstraction and component based, I would like to seek all of your suggestions.

d) Lastly the scalability of JSF in a clustered environment. The fact that JSF uses session scope a lot for keeping backing beans, it has to have some problems with scalability in a clustered environment. Any suggestions ?

Any help will be appreciated.

Thanks.
- Debasish

[Barend]

a) How mature is the integration of Spring 2.0 with JSF managed beans ? I remember I saw some part of it broken in one of the Spring One presentations by Colin Sampaleanu.

In my experience so far (that is, a few days of toying around with Spring and JSF, and no prior experience with JSF) I've found that if you inject a Spring-managed bean (e.g. a DAO) into a transient field of a JSF backingbean, that field is not re-injected on deserialization of the backingbean. You'll need a readResolve method to fetch it for you.

b) Should I use Spring managed beans injected as services into JSF managed beans in faces-config.xml OR totally do away with JSF managed beans and have Spring beans directly in faces-config.xml ? I am not sure if the latter is possible or not though.

I know the latter is the approach that Seam takes. I haven't fully investigated it yet, but I'm under the impression that it's not currently possible with Spring and JSF. The former works fine, with the caveat mentioned under (a).

c) Integration of JSF and SWF. I like SWF a lot and would not give it up just for using JSF.

This is on my to-do list for this week. Haven't gotten around to it yet. It should work fine, but be aware there's a back-button issue: SWF-168 @ Spring JIRA.

d) Lastly the scalability of JSF in a clustered environment. The fact that JSF uses session scope a lot for keeping backing beans, it has to have some problems with scalability in a clustered environment.

I have no experience here.