Remembering the Future

I agree that JSF is nicer then Struts, but I don't consider that much of a compliment.

The problem with JSF is that they hyped it to the hilt, took years to develop it, and then the actual release wound up doing a small percentage of what existing open source frameworks that JSF is supposed to replace do. Now they are feeling a backlash from that. Also I think Java developers tend to dislike and feel threatened by anything that promises to make development easier and more visual. Everybody seems to be afraid of hordes of VB programmers invading the Java realm and taking jobs away from the “real” Java programmers.

The good news about JSF (in my opinion) is that has a pretty good design, a lot of industry backing and will probably catch up to all the open source frameworks in a few more years. In the mean time you will have to do a lot more plumbing code then with other frameworks and that code will be more or less throw away whenever the "standard" equivalent comes out.

I also have a feeling that by the time JSF does everything it should, the whole request/response/generate HTML paradigm will start to be superceded by rich client technologies like XUL, XForms, Flex, Longhorn, JDNC or whoever wins the browser based rich client battles to come. So no matter what, I think JSF will always be have a bad reputation. It's just a day late and a dollar short.