When Oracle Corp. bought Sun Microsystems Inc. and took Java under its wing, some thought that JavaServer Faces (JSF) would go the way of Latin and Sanskrit. Contrary to those predictions, however, Oracle’s focus on enterprise didn’t shove JSF into the background in favor of other technologies. Instead, Oracle continues to promote JSF as a way to handle front-end development.

Java developers and experts say JSF is alive and well, and poised to complement HTML5 and JavaScript – and, in some cases, replace Adobe Flash.

 â€œIn April 2011, we started work on the next major revision of the JSF specification, version 2.2,â€? says Ed Burns, consulting member of the Technical Staff at Oracle and the specification lead for JSF.  “Just this week, we released a milestone 1 snapshot implementation of that specification, which is still very much in active development.â€?

This is an excerpt of a JavaServer Faces news article on our sister site, SearchSOA.com. Check out the full article and let us know what you think about the new changes in JSF.

Overal I think JSF is doing better and better with each release. Most pain points were addressed in 2.0 and 2.1/2.2 is tying up quite a few loose ends. Much looking forward to the final release.

I wrote an article that covers the recent changes in the JSF 2.2 trunk, which can be found here.

Yes, Oracle is definitely continuing to invest in JSF (e.g. the specification lead, Ed Burns, works for Oracle, and Oracle ADF uses JSF extensively), but Java standards and libraries have many more contributors than just Oracle, so you should measure something's health in the Java ecosystem by looking at more than Oracle's commitment to it. JSF continues to mature and grow its success on its merits and by the widespread support that it gets from lots of different vendors, open source projects, and the many implementors who are using it to create applications.

Peace,

Cameron Purdy | Oracle

The biggest advantage of JSF is one can map UI components to different beans which in-turn help creating objects as per design. We can have 4 different scopes as per our needs. And custom components avoid code duplication.

Definitely made web developers life easier on UI front.