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"JSF 2.0: Despite some early critic, JSF is becoming the default web layer technology in Java EE. In a way, JSF can be seen as a foundational technology upon which a very vibrant community is able to build exciting new solutions." - That's great to hear because I stay away from both. Seems ironic they have found each other so useful :-/

Uhmmm... ok, and I stay away from Ruby and from PHP and on the Java platform from Wicket and from Struts and from Tapestry and from... But how useful would it be if I commented about that on postings related to any of those tools/platforms?

I mean what would anyone care about the tools you personally are *not* using?

Now if you had some valid complaints or some success stories to tell about some competing technology, sure be my guest.

Well since the pushing of JSF and EE is to the level of in your face, i figure why not bitch and moan for all the times it bit the average developer in the butt.

Can you give a concrete example of when it "bit you in the butt"?

JSF for example helped me incredible well with organizing my UI related code and providing a clean separation between business code, control logic and the view. The save state mechanism has helped me to build a very simple yet powerful conversation scope. Simple and thin backing beans containing only some render specific code and delegating to the business tier are extremely helpful in organizing the different responsibilities in my applications. Also, the conversion and validation of input values has a very clear place in the JSF lifecycle, which is a Good Thing.

On projects not using JSF I far too often catch programmers not doing any validation before throwing user input in the business code. All kinds of vulnerabilities and weird behavior results from that. Since validation has such a natural place in JSF, it's more tempting for programmers to use it than not to use it.

Compare this with platforms that don't have this phase explicitly build in. Programmers often simply don't think about validation which really is a Bad Thing. Also, don't get me started about platforms that don't encourage programmers to use a MVC approach. The horror of finding lines of business code duplicated on >100 pages between stuff like the opening of a > tag and a > inside some obscure JSP of PHP is almost undesribable.

If such practices are what you preach, I'm sure you may not like JSF or Java in general. The least you can do though is give some specifics about what you don't like. Saying "Java sucks!" or "My platform XXX is better than yours, since all your platform does is sh*t" is what anybody can do. I can say that about RoR without ever haven written a line of code in it. Is such unfounded ranting helpful to anyone? I don't think so...

First of all I am a Java developer, so cut the crap about RoR and other such platform vs platform arguments. I know first hand about all the shit developers had to put up with JSF. The freaken moving target of all implementations, and I used it early on and gave it more tries when the standard finalized. JSF is broken because it bleeds JSP and makes for very bad implementation. Java EE is bad because it's so freaken BLOATED! and cross vendors suck at their containers. Out of 4 Java EE projects i've been part of, not one went good. And I am sure you will blame it on the developers, but hey if developers can't work with it, who can. Just way to complex to do anything simple. As of now I use Spring with Velocity and it works well and is simple enough for us "regular fokes". You don't need a sledge hammer to hammer in a nail. Might also want to cut back on the thinking everyone that complains about Java is a Rails person, because some of us love Java and WANT it to get better!

>JSF is broken because it bleeds JSP

-that's- your entire argument? JSF is broken because it 'bleeds' JSP?

Perhaps you should know then that JSP is -a- view description technology and not -the- view description technology. You can just as easily describe your view using an alternative one, like Facelets or if that suits your usecase better, using plain Java.

In JSF the view description technology is completely pluggable. There is not a single dependency on JSP in the whole of JSF. Therefor, JSF can't be broken because of JSP since it never depends on it.

>Java EE is bad because it's so freaken BLOATED!

Bloated is an extremely subjective term. Do you think it's bloated because of the amount of bytes that sit on your hardisk? Or the amount of API's there are available? To get started, did you ever check out how large the full Spring distribution is? Just download it and look at the size. Now download Jboss or Glassfish and also look at the size. You might be in for a surprise.

Next to that, Java EE doesn't force you to use any of its technologies. There is a wealth of solutions offered for if you need them, but nothing is forced upon you. How can that possibly be bloated? For example, if you really wanted, then you could use *only* servlets to program your application. Like wise, you could use only JSP pages with java code on it. For a 1 page 'home page' style thing, this may even be a realistic option. Now if you needed messaging, you can just take advantage of what's in JMS. You don't even have to use EJB for that, JMS is usable by itself. Likewise for transactions. You don't HAVE to use them, but if you want JTA is there for you. Again, with or without EJB or JSF for that matter.

I could go on, but that fact is that Java EE offers a lot of powerful options that you can mix and match to your liking. I can't possibly call that bloated. Spring offers a lot of powerful options too and its size on your HD is quite huge. If you call Java EE bloated, then you really should call Spring bloated too. You won't hear me saying that though, they are both powerful platforms that do approximately the same thing in a slightly different way.