ICEsoft released version 1.0 of their ICEfaces product, including a Community Edition that is free to develop with and deploy. They offer a commercial upgrade that adds a few features for greater scalability required by enterprise level-deployments, such as clustering.

We interviewed Steve Maryka, ICEsoft CTO, at JavaOne. He said developers should be "afraid of JavaScript," because "JavaScript implementations in browsers are all slightly different and those idiosyncrasies will cause a great deal of pain as you try to get your application to run across multiple types of browsers, such as Firefox, IE, and Safari."

The approach that ICEsoft takes to soothe this pain is to provide a "bridge" that sites between your Java application and the browser. You use JSF components, and those components take care of getting JavaScript to work across various browsers. "The JavaScript that you need is already developed," said Maryka. "The product has 48K of JavaScript, and all the cross-browser idiosyncrasies have already been worked out of this piece of JavaScript. And as you build up an application, regardless of how sophisticated it is, it remains that one piece of JavaScript that you require, so you don't need to develop any [JavaScript]."

This approach to creating rich clients means that Java developers can continue to work in Java, while deploying to JavaScript clients. As Robert Lepack, VP Marketing at ICEsoft, put it, "We want Java developers to continue to do what they do best, which is develop Java code, and benefit from the built-in AJAX capability of our framework."

What has been your experience with getting JavaScript to work across multiple browsers? I.e., to what extent do you think developers should be scared of JavaScript? What do you think of ICEsoft's approach to dealing with the JavaScript compatibility challenge?