Ask HN: Do you still use JSF?

3 points·moonlighter··3 comments

Suppose you're familiar with JSF and trying to build something NEW and public (not an 'internal only' app).

Would you still consider using it? If yes, why? If no, why not?

From what I can tell, JSF development is still popular with corporate app developers building in-house apps, etc. I'm not sure if this also holds true for the entrepreneurial hacker though, so I figured I"ll ask the best (You!). Thank you!

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I've long since abandonned JSF in favor of Wicket to build what you call in-house apps: the latter being much more designer-and-developer-friendly imho. But I wouldn't use Wicket (nor JSF for that matter) for a public facing site, because it relies too much on the session. It is possible to produce stateless pages in Wicket but it's not worth the hassle. For such a use case, I would rather use a classic MVC-style framework. Something à la Stripes or Spring MVC, although I am not very happy with the prospect of using JSP (or Freemarker or Velocity) as the view layer. I'm also experimenting with using JAX-RS, coupled with a templating library as a web framework. Didn't push the experiment too far though, but it's clear that it's a barebone solution compared to classic web frameworks.

Thanks jawher. Given the lack of other comments, it sure sounds its pretty much dead ;)

Used it for an internal app last year at a certain big blue company. People claim it's light years better than struts, but I would never want to use it in a personal project.

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