JSF & Struts
So many people these days are asking if JSF can be used on its own or does it need the Struts integration to be useful.
As I recall back pre EA4 JSF did not have a navigation model and thus you either had to write it yourself or use an existing one. Craig McClanahan was kind enough to work the wee hours to make the integration possible. So with the Struts/JSF stuff you could use the JSF components for rendering and Struts to manage your navigation.
When EA4 shipped though JSF got its own navigation support and could manage everything that Struts did and became a full-fledged framework for building web apps and thus no longer needed Struts to be useful.
Now there seems to be confusion that you have to use Struts to make JSF useful. The way I see it (please correct me where wrong) you should not be using the Struts integration except for a peaceful migration path from Struts to JSF.
There, I've finally gotten that off my chest. Please comment if I'm being a bone head.
Is it true that JSF does not have template support (tiles in Struts)? Tiles has been very useful in creating consistent look and feel.
A separate question, how smoothly will 3rd party UI components integrated with JSF IDEs? If not, using vendor specific UI components can mean a lock-in to the IDE of that vendor...
Posted by Michael on April 01, 2004 at 04:57 PM MST #
Hi Michael, JSF does not have 'tiles' support but it is easy enough to do similar functionality. The book has a couple of examples that show how to do this. (tiles type functionality is not he main point of the example but you will see how to do it). Also you can use the tiles support from Struts thanks again to Craig. One of the major focus' of JSF was to make it easy for 3rd party components to plug into IDE's as well as the runtime stuff. Only time will tell but from understanding of the API's it should work well.
Posted by Bill Dudney on April 02, 2004 at 02:56 AM MST #