Exadel, Inc. announced the availability of JSF Studio Professional, a Web Integrated Development Environment (WIDE) for Sun JavaServer Faces. In fact, JSF Studio is the first commercial development environment of any kind for JSF. It applies the same visual drag-and-connect approach used in Exadel's Struts Studio WIDE for Jakarta Struts. With this announcement, Exadel further extends its line of "Profession Tools for Open Source."

Exadel believes that tools should extend the power of development, not limit it or impose trade-offs. So, JSF Studio is designed to provide the benefits of visual editing for JSF applications without sacrificing any source-level control at all. Additionally, JSF Studio includes a flexible import facility to work with existing JSF and other Web applications along with a straight-forward wizard for creating new JSF projects from scratch.

Links:
More Information and Downloading
Short Visual Getting Started Presentation

Key Features of JSF Studio:
* Viewing and editing JSF configuration files using a visual drag-and-connect metaphor
* Standard skeleton templates for new JSF projects
* Advanced wizard for importing existing JSF projects
* Two-way synchronization between managed-beans and Java source
* Built-in JSP editor with syntax highlighting
* Advanced Drag-n-Drop from the JSF Projects view to the JSP Editor
* Editing unicode characters in the Properties Editor
Advanced Tag Palette with the ability to easily add new tag library sets and edit existing ones
* Design-time JSP previewing with the ability to define the output for custom tags with Velocity templates
* XML prompting (code completion) for all JSF-related files and any other XML files with an associated DTD
* Java debugging of Web applications under Tomcat
Servlet Container Control Panel: Start, Stop, Restart and Start in Debug Mode
* Embedded Verification Framework with the ability to check consistency among different kinds of XML configuration files and JSP files

They are also previewing their ORM Studio (Hibernate Edition).

Visual guide ORM Studio in action.

IMO: There is no real need for ORM studio to exist. There is XDoclet which is IDE agnostic and it makes mapping extremely obvious and always in sync with class code:
<code>
/**
 * @hibernate.class table="corrective_action"
 */
public class CorrectiveAction {

  private Integer id;
  private Integer auditConductId;
  private Person assignedTo;

  /**
    * @hibernate.id
    * generator-class="sequence"
    * generator-parameter-name-1="sequence"
    * generator-parameter-value-1="CORR_ACTION_SEQ"
    * column="id"
    * unsaved-value="null"
    * @return
    */
  public Integer getId() {
    return id;
  }

  public void setId( Integer id ) {
    this.id = id;
  }

  /**
   * @hibernate.property column="conduct_id"
   */
  public Integer getAuditConductId() {
    return auditConductId;
  }

    public void setAuditConductId( Integer auditConductId ) {
    this.auditConductId = auditConductId;
  }

  /**
    * @hibernate.many-to-one column="assigned_to"
    */
  public Person getAssignedTo() {
    return assignedTo;
  }

  public void setAssignedTo( Person assignedTo ) {
    this.assignedTo = assignedTo;
  }

</code>

IMO: There is no real need for ORM studio to exist. There is XDoclet which is IDE agnostic and it makes mapping extremely obvious and always in sync with class code

How these two statements related to each other?
Even if you have everything in java sources (what is not always a good thing), we can improve visual mapping editor so that it will operate directly on your sources. If you don't like visual editors at all, you still can use it to print nice pictures for project documentation and for people who don't understand source code, which are majority btw.

I'd buy it in a heartbeat(ORM). If they'd only keep it in synch with Eclipse, not M* versions back!

ORM Studio and JSF Studio versions that support Eclipse3.0M8/M9 will be released in the middle of the May, 2004.

P.S. The scheduled date for M9 is May 7.

JSF Studio and ORM Studio have been released under Eclipse 3.0

>In fact, JSF Studio is the first commercial development environment of any >kind for JSF
and Sun's Creator ?

Creator is going to be released only at the end of June, you know.

Exadel seems like they are filling a nice niche in development tools, but currently I would be afraid to recommend them because of an unpredictable pricing strategy.

Struts Studio isn't even a year old, and they are on version 5.x. That's four major version upgrades in less than a year!

Why is this important? Because even if you purchase full support, you do not get free upgrades to a major version -- you get 'up to 40% discount' on licenses for a new major version.

I don't think I would pay $400+ for JSF Studio 1.x, knowing that I will probably be shaken down for more license fees in the next two to three months. Exadel needs to offer at least a year of guaranteed upgrades to get my confidence at this point.

Struts Studio isn't even a year old, and they are on version 5.x. That's four major version upgrades in less than a year!Why is this important? Because even if you purchase full support, you do not get free upgrades to a major version -- you get 'up to 40% discount' on licenses for a new major version.

And again XDoclet comes to rescue, just place comments in actions and struts config file is done:

/**
 * @struts.action path="/auditconduct/list"
 * name="auditFilterForm"
 * attribute="auditFilterForm"
 * scope="session"
 *
 * @struts.action-forward name="list" path="audit.list"
 * @struts.action-forward name="splash" path="/do/audit/splash"
 */

public class AuditConductListAction extends AbstractAction {
.....

Struts Studio isn't even a year old, and they are on version 5.x. That's four major version upgrades in less than a year!

The first (Swing) version was 4.5, because, technically speaking, it was an Exadel v. 4.3 adopted for Struts. The first Eclipse version was 5.0. Now, we still have only 5.2 after one year.

I think Exadel's products are a good thing.
Have you used the Studio Creator? Slooooow.
I would much rather have a tool that integrates into Eclipse and feels alot smoother to use than SC.
I guess if you want the productivity you will be willing to put of for the tool, otherwise use XDoclet and get the job done that way.
But the goal of JSF is to have tools built on top of it to enable Java based web app development to match and hopefully surpass the productivity you get with ASP.NET and VS.NET.

IBM is planning to release Websphere Studio 5.1.2 on May 21st.

Link: http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3349281

The tool will support JSF 1.0