I read various postings yesterday on whether any real applications are written in struts, and then on different threads bits of talk on JSF. Struts is used all over the place by heavy duty clients, I'd be interested if the same can me said of JSF. Having tried to make the move to JSF (as there are many things I really like about it) I've had to admit defeat and I'm looking back to struts.
I've just learnt the hard way that its worth sticking with struts, if the struts-faces lib actually made it to the release distribution then perhaps i'd use it, but it would require anyone working on this sort of thing to be aware of the historical context of the relation ship between struts and JSF and also to know something about both. Okay after years of chin scratching expert groups and such like, here's one example of something that the quick to publish examples don't cover. You have 1 backing bean which controls naviagtion and subnavigation forms. You need to use commandLinks as you need the request to be processed in the backing bean, and outputLink wont do this. So the user clicks a top level menu item in form one and this displays a submenu in form 2 (both using ListDataModel). Now try and use one of the submenu links. The rendered code wont work, but will work with commandButton. Its a shame because I really like JSF, but this sort of thing to too costly. Every single thing said about the reference implementation is just responded to with a "well create your own componant or this is just a reference implemenation". Sure you don't expect colour pickers and dhtml calendars but the basics you do expect to be covered. As an auxilary point I have no idea why rendering javascript links was considered a good option for commandLink. As its the only means of generating dynamic menus with the standard tags, it ,means that those rancid little spiders that cant read javascript wont be able to index the pages. I set out to use JSF with a positive mind set, but gradually I've had to admit defeat. The real shame is that the likes of .NET are out there, and all the heel dragging with JSF can only damage it further. We can only hope that the likes of myfaces, can move along faster than the grueling JCP and perhaps help puch things along a bit faster. I could be wrong but if JSF is the view technology of choice when shale starts to emerge I'll be suprised. Not because its a bad idea, but because it too slow to emerge. Again Im only talking about using the basic componants in a simple way. I know have strong sympathies with the struts developers who are keen that shale isn't bound too closely to JSF. But on the other hand I can only feel disappointed because JSF has so much promise. If someone wants to point out how I'm misguided or stupid in some way and that the 2 form scenerio with dynamically generated links is plainly wrong I'd like to hear it. Mark --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
