Hi Fellows, hope you are all fine and enjoying your coding. I have a few issues that I need to solve and I was hoping you to help me out, and to open a discussion around this topic. Our company is considering a change in it's architecture for web based products. Currently we've been using JSF for 4 years (MyFaces, and since 2007 MyFaces-Richfaces) and the experience has been a mixture of bad and good. Now we are considering our next step for the next 3-4 years. Here are some of our considerations. *JSF 2.0. Will it be released? Will Oracle support it? It is worthwhile to wait for it? -Which implementation? Richfaces? IceFaces? PrimeFaces? Woodstock?.... *ZK. Really amazing, but the license terms aren't clear. *Flex. Well, some like it, some don't. May be too much XML. *Grails. Management says it's to immature and not that trustable...yet. *Swing (Applents or WebStart). Mmmm, many of our developers like swing. Will Swing survive Oracle? *Wicket. Usually we love it, but it is really difficult for newcomers and designers to work with. *Spring MVC. I've heard a big buzz about it....and suddenly silence. So, what your bet for a your tech for the next 4 years would be?

Drop JSF and other server side presentation technologies. Take advantage of client side presentation technologies. Application server is good for providing data and security control but not good for presentation tier. Adapt JAX-RS with any client side presentation technologies( Flex, Ext, Dojo, JQuery, GWT) is my decision.

Thanks for the answer. That seems a little radical, don't u think? But it may work...

take what I say w/ a grain of salt, but, I agree that is a pretty radical shift. Especially given the fact that you have a big investment in an existing server-side JSF. The other problem I have w/ client-side is I find it very difficult to debug - firefox and chrome are a big help but I still find doing a lot of coding (javascript) on the client to be laborious. To this point, I've tried to stick w/ the KISS principal: JSP, JSTL, and jQuery & jQueryUI for the client presentation.

JBoss package is very stable & agile enough to carry out enterprise requirements, I think. JBoss Seam + EJB + JSF + Richfaces + (optional RIA, may be OpenFaces, ZK) may be used in general cases, without any doubts. Any business process modeling mechanism makes great efficiency with support of Seam MVC. These are plus'es for future. Besides all of these, any rapid RIA frameworks & tools may be used for low-risk business processes, like Wavemaker, JBoss Studio code-generation tools.

If you do not move to client side MVC. Than you will again need to move in 1 yr.

(See the traction in market for client side MVC).

BTW: JSF is dead technology