(Java.net via JavaBlogs)
But… and this is a big but… all of this has gotten a bit out of hand, and it’s well on the way toward turning into an absolute nightmare with Ajax. The underlying theory here is that there is a “web designer” who does a bit of futzing with JavaScript, and there is a server-side developer that does the “hard stuff.”
I can only whole-heartedly agree. On the project I’m currently working on, there is a mishmash of Taglibs and JavaECMAScript “widgets”. The design seems to be partially influenced by JSF.
However, we have a requirement to work both in Firefox and MSIE. Unfortunately, cross-browser scripting/DHTML is very difficult to get just right. The app relies so heavily on scripting, if the user had it turned off (which is not all that unlikely), the app would completely fail to function properly.
On top of that, the GUI and server-side layers are coupled so tightly that a small piece of data not loaded on the server will cause all sorts of evil GUI things happening. The MSIE script debugger just doesn’t work, which left me with only one other option: using window.alert() to debug what was going on.
If you scroll down to the comments, you’ll see Crag McClanahan pushing JSF, like some vintage travelling salesman peddling his wares. He extolls the notion of graphical GUI builders and vendor tools, which seems to be a theme whenever I read stuff about JSF.
JSF seems more about (buyable) tools and components, rather than quickly and cleanly building web applications. The last thing I want to do is pay tons of money for a “component” that I can drag and drop into an application. Wasn’t this the promise of Swing, or even JavaBeans?