Blogoforum - Java Web Development Can Be Much Easier Then It Is Now

One of most respectful people in software loves JSF. But me not.

Here's a discussion on interview with Gavin King:
http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=39214
Gavin King is author of most widely used Java persistence framework. Enough to say about Gavin to state he has some respect. Unfortunately this time he provided mostly subjective and questionable arguments.

Here are my subjective thoughts. I wrote a bit about JSF before:
http://talkinghub.com/message/153.html#message
What I felt trying to build this app with JSF is simply that I can be more productive. Web development should be extremely easy comparing to GUI development. Why? Simply because almost all we are working with is just text! And all the stuff is (cross-platform) standard defined years ago! No platform-dependent line-by-line or pixel-by-pixel drawing, no system-dependent user and other events, and who knows what else stuff to deal with in the world of GUI clients. This is why we have so little GUI frameworks. This is why we have so many web frameworks. Because the web development is generally easier then GUI client development.

So while working with JSF I was unproductive even comparing to Swing development. Yes I used uncommon nowhere recommended approach using JSF in my app. I was using it with HTML templates, without XML configs, without additional JavaBean layer, and with high number of custom components. My development was going a lot slower then the same thing could be using Swing. Both MyFaces and Sun's JSF RI source code quality is big opportunity for improvement. MyFaces JSF implementation worked buggy with my HTML templates so I ended up with tricky combination of 3rd party MyFaces custom component library and Sun's reference JSF implementation. Yeah, weird!

"Something is wrong" I started to think. "We have cross-platform, standard, very simple text technology (HTTP) comparing to Swing - so why I am so slow comparing to Swing?" So I decided to move forward.

I just throw off the entire UI layer I wrote at that time except my HTML templates. I looked at Tapestry but lot of XML configs and long learning curve scared me away. How many pages that book on Tapestry does have? Just no time for it.

I started with plain servlets and for just one day I had my UI powered by my own small library. No XML configs, no additional layers, no "expression language". I fed it with my HTML templates I already had and it started working.

And I felt much comfortable with what I wrote. Do you know this nice feeling when you are confident in what has been made by your own hands? When you know it will work as you desire, and you can modify it as you desire, and nothing stops you and you can do just everything you would need.

And it works as you see. Now development is so extremely simple that I can change HTML List to HTML Table or HTML DIV with subDivs without touching Java code at all, simply by modifying the template.

Another side effect I got was execution speed - requests started to process a lot faster. Good for the future.

Interesting note. I looked at Wicket framework recently. Looks pretty similar to what I did by myself.

By the way - thanks to JSF and other today's web frameworks - this knowledge helped me a lot to build my UI layer fast.

Do you have experience using JSF with HTML templates?


Denis Krukovsky.