Ed Burns's Blog

Motherhood, Apple Pie and Web apps

In my recent spate of speaking engagements, I have been including a "motherhood and apple pie" slide in my presentations about JSF and Ajax. I put this in my slides in response to a question I sometimes hear when I make the case for JSF and Ajax. The question goes something like this:

Hey, why do I need JSF, or any other server side framework for that matter? With Ajax, or things like GWT, can't I just put it all in the client? I mean, let's just do everything in JavaScript!

You're welcome to do that, but if you do, please know that you'll have to do all of these things yourself. As you may guess, JSF already does all of these for you, does them quite well, and does them in a way that is an industry standard, with the brainpower of leading minds from Oracle, Sun, IBM, Apache, the Open Source Community, and others.

This is why I have been spending my spare time trying to get Project jMaki to have first class support for JSF as a core part of its feature set and value proposition. In fact, if you support this idea, please send an email to the jMaki User list saying that you think this is important. For some exmples of this in action, please see here, here, here, and here.

Comments

• Warning: this is a bit off-topic (no questions about apple pie today).

  I've been trying to find an answer to a question about the JSP 2.0 / 2.1 spec, without success. (It seems the JSP/Servlet team does not visit the JSP/JSTL forum on sun.com).

  Anyway, the question: The standard action jsp:useBean allows one to specify types. The exact types allowed depends on using "class" or "type" attribute, etc. Let's assume we're talking about the "type" attribute here, since it supports more types.

  Are array types supported (for "type")? I've seen Pierre(sp?) and others mention that they are, but the spec is silent.
  What about parameterized types? There are obvious angle bracket problems when using this in JSP Documents, but it seems to work in regular JSPs (Tomcat 5.5.x). Again, no mention at all in even JSP 2.1

  
  Thanks in advance (if you decide to look into this).

  Posted by: plethora on November 14, 2006 at 12:45 AM

• It is important that JSF applications have the ability to compete on the same visual level as other frameworks using these third party Javascript libraries but I've found them difficult to integrate with JSF, particularly when combined with some sort of partial rendering that refreshes from the component tree model. Most Javascript libraries are not tolerant of their DOM manipulations being overwritten on a refresh from the component tree, they just don't re-check before using them again. To be fair all that I've done is with 1.1 rather than 1.2 and Dynafaces so maybe its not as difficult there. By the way, the first link doesn't behave properly for me in Firefox 1.5.0.8, I get random Customer name cells that contain part of the tag attributes rather than the value. For example (there's more but I trimmed it off): ',baseDir:'http://sunapp1.whardy.com:8090/jsf-jmaki/resources/scriptaculous/inplace',script:) The last two links throw internal exception errors.

  Posted by: smccoole on November 21, 2006 at 02:05 PM

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