Comments on: JSF is Not Fixable

By: Directory Submission

Directory Submission — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 19:28:08 +0000

I’ve recently started a blog, the information you provide on this site has helped me tremendously. Thank you for all of your time & work.

By: Alain O'Dea

Alain O'Dea — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 18:00:04 +0000

I use JSF at work as part of maintaining a mature intranet web application. Proxy caching is not possible since we use JSF directly. It has proven so difficult to make our system work on the latest MyFaces release that we have chosen to stick with the old version. I have serious misgivings about a technology standard that fails so badly for existing developers as it matures. While it has proven to be quite useful on getting the application working and in front of customers it has also imposed significant scalability problems.

JSF encourages a stateful programming model that facilitates unscalable web application designs. I would go so far as to say that it encourages it. JSF can be fixed, but doing so would make it completely incompatible with JSF as we know it today. This would effectively require a complete rewrite of our web application component. Given the obvious lack of attention paid to HTTP in JSF 1.x I intend to do everything in my power to discourage my company from adopting it. I believe that Sun has too many big shot RPC advocates egos on the line to abandon this obviously flawed protocol tunnel they have built on top of HTTP.

In short I agree with this article completely and say it is time for JSF to go away and stop wasting valuable time and resources.

By: subbu

subbu — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:49:30 +0000

Thanks. I never heard him speak, but I found the same from their docs. I don’t understand why the other “Anonymous” commenter was so defensive about JSF. Let’s call a spade a spade.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:42:04 +0000

Subbu, I agree with you. Seam, et. al. actually encourages and promotes stateful, session-heavy, web applications. If you’ve ever heard Gavin King’s talks on Seam, you’d see that is one of the first things he tries to hammer into the audience. That a stateful applications are “modern”. Conversations are *central* to Seam and a conversation requires a lot of state on the server in his implementation.

By: Emmanuel Pirsch

Emmanuel Pirsch — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 13:03:42 +0000

It's been a long time since I wanted to post about JSF being not fixable... This post gave me the kick in the but.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:10:51 +0000

Yes. The issue tracker has tickets that talk about making JSF stateless wherever possible, and improving the state saving mechanism for when state is necessary. I look forward to reading about this and full HTTP GET support in the next public draft.

By: subbu

subbu — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:02:48 +0000

Thanks for the update. By the way, the key issue is not necessarily how to manage state, but to allow stateless applications. State management is nice to have when an app needs it, but that should be an option.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 14:18:41 +0000

Someone in the JSF expert group told me that fixing state saving is the top most issue being worked on right now. They hope to have it in the public review draft which is due out very soon.

By: shay

shay — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 15:17:48 +0000

Oracle’s ADF framework also offers the ability to set Get as the method to invoke JSF as well as bookmarking JSF pages.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 15:14:09 +0000

Ok, and I will agree that JSF 1.2 needs addons like Facelets, Seam and component libraries to make it competitive. Your blog says JSF is not fixable. The point I am trying to make is that it is fixable, the existing JSF extensions prove it, and they are being standardized in JSF 2.0.