The Apache MyFaces project has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a top level Apache project. MyFaces is the first open source implementation of JavaServer Faces.

The promotion of MyFaces from the Jakarta incubator project to a top-level project means that Apache considers the project relevant and healthy. Apache thus expects the project to be viable.

Some developers have protested Sun's likely inclusion of JSF as the standard web GUI specification for J2EE 1.6, indicating that it might throttle the ongong development of frameworks such as Struts, Tapestry, WebWork, RIFE, and others. However, JSF backers state that JSF is meant to work with these frameworks instead of against them.

What do you think?

Links:

JavaServer Faces
JSF Central
James Holmes' JavaServer Faces Resources

First of all, congrats to the MyFaces team.

I personally believe the J2EE community needs a standardization of the presentation layer. In my opinion there are too many web frameworks generating entropy.

However, I would have let the community choose what's the best option. While I appreciate JSF, having a look at the market and propose an existing framework as a standard would have done better.

I personally believe the J2EE community needs a standardization of the presentation layer.

I think compitition is always good. Let the market to make those decision.

By the way, JSF is kind of son of Struts.

I personally believe the J2EE community needs a standardization of the presentation layer.

I think compitition is always good. Let the market to make those decision. By the way, JSF is kind of son of Struts.

Good thing that in this instance that the son didn't turn out to be like his father.

I personally believe the J2EE community needs a standardization of the presentation layer.

I think competition is always good. Let the market to make those decision.

X Windows did not standardize on a presentation layer and that led to the OpenLook vs Motif wars. The market finally decided on Motif but only after the damage had been done.

Those who pay $$$ for a J2EE server deserve a presentation layer included. You're still free to use it or not.

I personally believe the J2EE community needs a standardization of the presentation layer.

I think competition is always good. Let the market to make those decision.

X Windows did not standardize on a presentation layer and that led to the OpenLook vs Motif wars. The market finally decided on Motif but only after the damage had been done.Those who pay $$$ for a J2EE server deserve a presentation layer included. You're still free to use it or not.

JSP is not a presentation layer?

JSF is purely page oriented visual basic bullshit. Why bloat j2ee with that? No respectable j2ee container provider would ever want to ship that with their deal. Oh wait, there isn't a single respectable j2ee container provider out there because all container (bar one) sucks.

JSF is purely page oriented visual basic bullshit.

No. JSF is a general-purpose component model for building user interfaces in which events are processed on a server. It far more than just a method of constructing web GUIs using visual tools. There are already renderkits for different interfaces - JSP, WML, SVG. JSF alone has flaws, but there are projects such as Shale to improve the controller aspects.

I personally believe the J2EE community needs a standardization of the presentation layer.

I think compitition is always good. Let the market to make those decision. [...]

Could you please explain why standardization works against competition? J2EE is also standardized, and there is a hell lot of compentition between application server vendors.

Regards,
    Dirk

Congratulation to the MyFaces team. Becoming a top level Apache project is a good sign of maturity.

So far, one year after the first release of the JavaServer Faces specification we have two very popular JSF implementations right now. Both implementations (MyFaces and JSF-RI) are open source. So, users selects the implementation not because it is a chipper one, but because of the technical aspects. From this point of view, MyFaces really shows the ability to be a competitive jsf implementation on the market. I expect we can see the good tooling support for MyFaces in the nearest future also.

--
Sergey : JSFTutorials.net

Are you expecting the MyFaces project to create their own IDE (or an IDE plug-in)? I don't think this will be needed, after all the point of having JSF as a standard will mean that any IDE that supports JSF development will be able to use MyFaces.

Yes. This is exactly my point. As soon as MyFaces becomes a top Apache project, the existing GUI tool providers will turn forward toward the supporting MyFaces implementation as well. This is my expectation.
Actually, this process has been started already. We, with the JSF Studio, already announced MyFaces support and we are going to add even more features in the upcomming Eclipse4Web. As you already mentioned, Oracle adopts thier ADF Component Library. Finally, SUN's Creator forum contains several request about supporting MyFaces.

--
Sergey : JSFTutorials.net

I don't think this will be needed, after all the point of having JSF as a standard will mean that any IDE that supports JSF development will be able to use MyFaces

No, I begin to believe more and more that the standards imposed by Sun are there only for their pockets (Exception being the ongoing work with EJB 3.0, this seems to be for developer also because otherwise EJB would have been dead and burried). Why did they have to come with something (JSF) w/o consulting the existing projects and the commercial wisdom they've gain in more than 3 years of production ? (like Tapestry ?). Why repeat the f**king mistake entity beans have been ?

Why did they have to come with something (JSF) w/o consulting the existing projects and the commercial wisdom they've gain in more than 3 years of production ?

They did consult.

The spec lead for the original JavaServer Faces JSR (127) was Craig R. McClanahan, who created Struts.

Having choices is always a good thing.
So, none of them have to go away. The competition is just doing good to all these platforms.

D. Orbach
javasight - java news & books>

While I agree that having a choice is good up to a point, I can't help but feel that having too many solutions to choose from can be confusing for someone looking to make a descision.

It's always comforting to be able to choose a technology that you know will continue to be relevant and supported because many other people are using it. When you have a situation like this, I don't feel that the variety helps. There are too many choices, and that makes a majority vote less likely. What would have happened if Java had had a few serious competitors? Would it have helped us, or would the community be divided amongst all those different languages, weakening vendor support?

You have how many different frameworks now? Struts, Tapestry, JSF...who knows how many others. Some are going to fall by the wayside, and what happens to their users? Well, they're going to have to move to one of the other solutions at some point.

I have no experience with JSF, but I applaud the concept. You have the best of both worlds: a standard franework to learn, but vendor choice when it comes to imlementation.

Oh, and congrats to the MyFaces team - maybe it's time for me to check out JSF now.

While I agree that having a choice is good up to a point, I can't help but feel that having too many solutions to choose from can be confusing for someone looking to make a descision.It's always comforting to be able to choose a technology that you know will continue to be relevant and supported because many other people are using it.

I really agree with Matt in this question.
I simply see it from the perspective of my company, we're a samll company and have only 5 developpers and we cannot afford to do a lot of research what's the best technology.
And even if I find a superiour framework, it may be dead after 1 or 2 years.
So I'd really like to see a standard for developping web applications.
For JSF there were made mistakes, it was too late and also not integrated properly in the existing technologies.
But it's not too late.
JSF makes your life easier, it really addresses a lot of issues every developper is facing every day.
There is strong support out there:
Sun, Orcale (ADF), Apache (MyFaces, StrutsShale)

BUT of course YOU PEOPLE out there make the decision! Nobody else.

I hope JSF will succeed!

Bernhard

I can't see, how jsf can ever work with those alternative frameworks. If a framework integrates with jsf, it is adding "proprietary extensions" to the jsf standard. nobody wants to adopt a standard and at the same time create a dependency to proprietary extension.

I have been trying to compare multiple JSF implementations (both open source and commercial) for a project at work. For some reasons, I never had good luck with myfaces.

With myfaces 1.0.7 and 1.0.8, I deployed the myfaces-examples.war to tomcat 5.5.4. When I hit the home page of the myfaces-examples web-app, I got a blank page. There were no clues on the server side logs as to what went wrong. I gave up.

Now when I see this posting, I downloaded myfaces 1.0.9 with renewed hope. I deployed the myfaces-examples.war to tomcat 5.5.4 again. This time the deployment of web-app failed with error "unable to find com.sun.faces.config.ConfigureListener"

That should be easy to fix. So I threw in jsf-impl-1.1.01.jar from JSF RI on to WEB-INF/lib. I still get the same error.

I have already evaluated JSF-RI, Oracle ADF and Jscape WGF without any problems. I hate to give up on myfaces but somehow I never seem to get it going.

Can anybody who had good experience with myfaces tell me what may be going on here. It may be something basic (like needs earlier version of tomcat or some such) but I can not see anything in docs.

I have been trying to compare multiple JSF implementations (both open source and commercial) for a project at work. For some reasons, I never had good luck with myfaces. With myfaces 1.0.7 and 1.0.8, I deployed the myfaces-examples.war to tomcat 5.5.4. When I hit the home page of the myfaces-examples web-app, I got a blank page. There were no clues on the server side logs as to what went wrong. I gave up.

Go for Tapestry and leave all that JSF nightmare in the distant past. Be happy.

Former happy Struts user and JSF evaluator.

Vishy Kasar,
your problem seems to be a very common problem on tomcat, and I think what you just missed, was to remove the jsp-2.0.jar and common-el.jar from your lin folder. In the Documentation this thematic is written down in the first outlet.

The second is interesting, you need to define this listener
in your web.xml. In don't if this tag is missing in the sample files, but the small sample project I created on my own in the brake, is running quite fine, without any errors. And I just spend 30 minutes for it.

Regards Johannes

Ok... the blank page seams to be solved!
Remove the jsp-2.0.jar and commons-el.jar inside of WEB-INF/lib

This time the deployment of web-app failed with error "unable to find com.sun.faces.config.ConfigureListener"That should be easy to fix. So I threw in jsf-impl-1.1.01.jar from JSF RI on to WEB-INF/lib.

You still have files from the RI in your web app.
RI and MyFaces *both* need ContextListener to start JSF facility. For MyFAces you have to define it in web.xml your self.

RI defines it inside their TLD files; So if you have those TLD files also in your web app, that throws the error message.

Both behaivors are documented on the MyFaces' website!

http://myfaces.apache.org

HTH,
Matthias

..that have already been posted ;)

regards,

Martin

Hi there,

I will try to answer some of your questions:

- for tomcat 5.5.x, you need to get rid of several libraries as described in http://myfaces.apache.org/docs/tomcat55.html

- the message you go is due to the fact that somewhere in your classpath (e.g. in commons/lib of your tomcat) the JSF RI is still residing, and now MyFaces and the RI get in conflict. Just try to move any RI-jar files out of the way, all you need is the myfaces.jar file for using MyFaces.

regards,

Martin

This is good news. I am happy to see MyFaces become a top level project.

Based on the news from TSSS in Vegas it seems like JSF has a lot of momentum, and support from the big vendors.

Even if you included JSF as part of the J2EE stack, there will be other frameworks that developer's use. Choice is good.

But, having a standard web component framework is nice as well.

Hopefully, JSF will adopt some of the nicer features of some of the competing frameworks in the next release.

JSF is Good (http://www.jroller.com/page/RickHigh/20040920).