Thursday, January 20, 2011

Why JSF is the most used framework

Today I've stumbled upon an article supposedly written by one of the developers of JSF standards.

http://www.zeroturnaround.com/blog/ed-burns-on-why-jsf-is-the-most-popular-framework/

Before I'll go any further I need to make it clear: I hate JSF! Yes, this is my personal opinion, my personal choice. I don't encourage you to do so as well - maybe it's good for you and saves you tons of hours of work - it didn't do so for me.

I'd like to point out that JSF is in my opinion a failed attempt to reproduce ASP.NET WebForms technology. Where WebForms succeeded (component market, easy design, easy event-driven programming model) JSF has failed miserably...

JSF is neither easy nor standard (if you look from a broader point of view and not keep your head in the Java box). I think JSF has the one and only advantage that allows inexperienced web application developers to stay inexperienced and not use core web technologies (HTML, CSS and EcmaScript). This is the reason why JSF is so damn popular - and so damn evil. Once you step into it there's no going back. You're stuck with it!

Like it or not the browser is a viewer that uses all 3 domain specific languages to achieve what it does so what you can do is either learn yet another DSL (the facelets DSL in this case) to do the job or you can simply go through the effort of learning the core ones which will pay off in the next and next and next web application projects no matter what technology you'll use (besides JSF of course)
To my liking it is unbearably sad that people dismiss the simple ideas and take a shot at frameworks like JSF. I wonder when the era will come with something else will replace JSF like WebServices are being replaced with REST.

Funny thing is that Ed draws a hard line between client-side-only frameworks (jQuery, Flex...) because they don't fit into his agenda but at the same time asks if "Wicket, Grails? Play? Echo2? Tapestry? Stripes?" will fulfill the goals that JSF is supposed to. It's funny because there's for example no Grails application that wouldn't use either Prototype or jQuery (or anything else for client-side programming). Funny :)

One final note: "jQuery+REST"? If you know what the author meant with it please leave a comment and explain it to me.

1 comment:

Matthias Hryniszak said...

http://www.zeroturnaround.com/blog/ed-burns-on-why-jsf-is-the-most-popular-framework/trackback/