Richard Monson-Haefel blogs about looking into JSF. Some of his comments include:
“It really seems complicated to me in terms of configuration, debugging, and such things.”
“JSF strikes me as an over-engineered solution that meets the needs of a small percentage of enterprise web sites.”
Appears to be seeing JSF for what it is right now. Interesting technology that isn’t that cleanly implemented. I really wonder how well JSF will succeed out in the world unless they can fix some of the difficulties with logging, debugging, and unit testing. That said we’re still pushing hard to make it work on several projects. One developer even mused recently that using a component with some built-in paging functionality, finally made him feel like there was something positive in JSF.
That’s where JSF shines. If you have a small set of components that dominate the UI, and those are extermley shophisticated components.
You can actually extrapolate a 80%/20% rule from that.
We’re hoping as we look into MyFaces and Facelets that some of the pain may go away. Of course implementing this within the Websphere stack may prove difficult.