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by dion.
Original Post: Tapestry Server Faces
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I went to see Erik Hatcher talk about Tapestry at the local JUG last night.
It was a good talk, as Erik does a good job and explaining what is good and bad at a developers level (no foofy high level marketing-speak :)
If you have used Tapestry, it is painful to look at JavaServer Faces applications. I had a really interesting conversation with Erik about how a framework is needed ON TOP of JSF, to give you a nice way to work.
How will we get this framework?
Tapestry Server Faces: In theory, since JSF has a lot of extension points, a Tapestry layer could be placed on top of the JSF event handling model. It would look like Tapestry. Feel like Tapestry, but would be running in JSF (I don't know what Tapestry would gain from doing all of this work though)
A Faces Impl: Something like MyFaces can come a long and write a layer on top of the JSF crud. They are already doing a good job on making some things easier... and this would be taking it to the next level
Struts: Some would argue that Struts as it exists is @deprecated (as Erik puts it). It could evolve to become glue on top of the base JSF framework
JSF itself: They could make the spec and the RI decent. Shocking I know.
Some New Thing: Of course, some bright spark can come along and out-do everyone :)
I wonder if this approach could work. Could we have a usable layer on top of JSF? Would JSF tools be able to work with this world too? Or will we always be stuck in a lowest common denominator?
As every vendor comes out, they have their own set of widgets, so you end up working on "Oracle JSF" versus "JSF" anyway. I know, in theory you could use Oracle components on some other server.... but in reality: it is about the tools, and sometimes that doesn't work that great.
In this vein, it was good to see the JSF Component Metadata Proposal from Oracle.
I really hope that there will be a JSF world where my HTML isn't hidden away under ugly taglibs. This is the web. We work with HTML. Let my designers see it!
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