This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by Dominik Wei-Fieg. Original Post: My thoughts about "JSF is way too complicated?" Feed Title: Ars Subtilior Feed URL: http://typo.ars-subtilior.com/articles.rss Feed Description: Finest Handmade Code Random thoughts about agile software development as an art Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by Dominik Wei-Fieg Latest Posts From Ars Subtilior

Imho, JSF is not too complicated. JSF was conceived for specific goals, and I think that JSF matches these goals very well. When you want to develop a java web application and can follow the path that JSF has laid out for you, you are well served. Integration with IDEs is available, RAD support, drag and drop development, it’s all included in the package. So, yes, JSF is not too complicated, if you use it the way it should be used.

JSF, e. g. , abstracts away the low level request-response layer inherent in all applications delivered over HTTP. I agree with Tim Shadel that the abstraction is leaky, but maybe programmers new to web development have something to gain from this abstraction.

It is only when you leave the troten path, when you make design decisions that were not considered in JSF, that JSF gets complicated. And even then, it is not actually JSF that gets complicated, but the fact that you have to work around a framework which was supposed to help you. It gets complicated because you have to dig through the seven layer burrito down to the request and the response to do what you want to do. Managed beans in request scope and bookmarkable URLs are, in my experience, things that have either not been considered in JSF, have been omitted on purpose or were, to the JSF creators, on the fringe of things considered necessary for a web framework.

I have done web development in Java since about eight years, starting out with Servlets going over JSP to JSF. I have also done web development in Perl, PHP and Python. And I currently do all my off-work projects in rails. Having worked with different frameworks written in different languages, I feel like there is a sweetspot between abstraction and allowing easy access to low level HTTP. And that sweetspot surely isn’t universal. But it seems that I share the same sweetspot with a lot of programmers. For me it’s rails. BUT: that does not mean that I would say that JSF is bad! It is just not a the level of abstraction I would like to work at.