Like many other people, I have been confused by all the JavaServer Faces hype. I went so far as to write this 64 days ago:
Whoever is in charge of JSF evangelization, quit talking architectures and show us something real. A 30 minutes video showing someone using JSF building a website would do. Just show us, like Curt did today, would you?
Well, I got my wish last night at the St. Louis JUG. IBM came over and demoed the JSF features in their RAD product.
After about fifteen minutes of high level talk, the content of which I have seen or heard elsewhere numerous times, the demo began. The rest fifty minutes of the talk was spent inside the IDE.
My take away from the beginning of the talk is this: "JSF is designed to be tooled."
And my take away from the demo part is this: "?!? @#$% (click-click-drag-drop-click-click-I've-seen-this-before-and-
this-is-called-Visual-Basic-3.-JSF?-What-JSF?-You-don't-
need-to-know-about-JSF-to-pointy-clicky-click.-Look-Ma-no-
code-Buy-the-tool."
To be fair. The Eclipse based IDE looks cool, although a bit sluggist at times. One audience member asked how much RAM is in the laptop. The answer is 2GB, but the demo is in a Windows VM with 1.5GB allocated.
Other tidbits from the meeting:
There are a lot Spring + Hibernate work being started now
A few IDEA users have upgraded to the latest 5.0 version (me included)
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