I'm worried for the future of JSF

[Jay Chauhan]

Hi GWTers,

Great work guys for keeping all the discussion at full throttle.

I recently took a deep look into GWT and I say this is phenomenal.
Also, I did exploration of JSF. This group has a lot of discussion
about fusing JSF and GWT and at first this sounds a good idea,
however, the question yet to be answered is why would you like to fuse
GWT with JSF??

In theory ( and in practice too), GWT is nothing but plain old
javascript (of course with some kool features) and you can put the
generated gwt.js file where ever you can put a piece of javascript,
for example within your html code, or jsp code or jsf code etc...

I am still trying to find out why anyone would like to use JSF when
all the features and coolness I am achieving straight with GWT with
built-in RPC magic.

I would like to hear your opinion.

Please keep the focus strictly on:
" What is that thing which can not be achieved in GWT only and
therefore JSF + GWT must be used as a combo"

Thanks,

-Jay

[Rob Jellinghaus]

On Jan 29, 1:36 pm, "Jay Chauhan" <jay.s.chau...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I recently took a deep look into GWT and I say this is phenomenal.
> Also, I did exploration of JSF. This group has a lot of discussion
> about fusing JSF and GWT and at first this sounds a good idea,
> however, the question yet to be answered is why would you like to fuse

> GWT with JSF??...

> Please keep the focus strictly on:
> " What is that thing which can not be achieved in GWT only and
> therefore JSF + GWT must be used as a combo"

Speaking as the person who's (AFAIK) putting the most time into
integrating GWT and JSF right now, I'll take a stab :-)

As far as I can see, using only GWT is fine if you want your entire
website to be rendered by Javascript.

But what if you don't? What if you have a website that you want to be
largely searchable by Google (hence using NON-GWT pages, since
Javascript apps aren't searchable by Google), but you want to have
only a few selected areas that are very heavily interactive? Or what
if you are part of a large portal deployment that is using JSF for the
overall site structure, navigation, etc., but you really want to use
GWT for some interactive piece? Or what if you have a JSF application
that has a lot of interesting server-side JSF beans, and you want to
quickly integrate a GWT application into your existing site, making
RPC calls to your existing server-side JSF beans?

It is less about "what is the one thing that you can't do in GWT" and
more about "what are the reasons why using GWT exclusively may not be
an option for you".

Basically, JSF and GWT seem very complementary. JSF is a component-
based technology for creating web sites, that supports static HTML-
only sites all the way up to lots of AJAX components all over. GWT is
a toolkit for creating entirely AJAX interfaces that approach the
functionality of full-fledged applications. Both technologies have
their strong points. There is an awful lot of overlap, but there is
also no reason in principle why they can't work together
harmoniously. So that's why I'm doing the work that I'm doing.

(Specifically, that work is:
- finalize and submit the patch for issue 389, see the very lengthy
thread in the Contributors forum
- restructure the g4jsf project to use the more flexible RPC
- integrate g4jsf with Seam, my #1 favorite server-side component
framework
- implement a blogging platform which uses mostly JSF for the
navigation and static / searchable pages, and mostly GWT for the
editing / content management pages
- Fail To Profit! because I'll make the whole thing open source :-D )

Cheers!
Rob

[Jay Chauhan]

Hi Rob,

Thanks for taking time to clarify your point of view, and I couldn't
agree more with you. Google Searchable part is a very strong point
for not using GWT alone and also retrofitting ( and not replacing )
the existing application is the reality and JSF + GWT combo is a good
use in that case.

If you take a look at the most recent reference application ( da Pet
Store) from Sun Microsystem then you will realize that JSF is just
sitting there almost idle and all the coolness is being taken care by
DOJO under the hood. That is the reason I wondered that if you are a
java nut ( i mean a java pro ;) ) then perhaps GWT is the best
weapon in your arsenal today.

Thanks a bunch.

-Jay

[mP]

The primarily problem with most Java presentation frameworks is that
they worry too much in implementing a better MVC and provide very
little in terms of widgets and browser client support. JSF is kinad of
guilty of this but not as much as other frameworks in that it
concentrates too much ont he server (java) and ignores the other
issues(browser).