richfaces alternative for website application development

Question

Can you let me know on the pros and cons of using richfaces and are there any alternatives for it. Its for a proposal submission for a web application. Its for managing documents and it will be intranet. There will be lots of users and main concern is security and ease of use.

Answer 1

Don't do it like that.

I suggest you to ask the same question to your team, after all they are the one, who will be developing it.

You must understand and find out what exactly is JSP, JSF, RichFaces, IceFaces, Facelets, AJAX, etc. are. You must know what all these technologies are meant for, and how and where they can be applied to solve which problem.

You should make a toy application using few viable alternatives, i.e. IceFaces, RichFaces, etc.. Then evaluate considering ease of use, support, strength, etc.

Answer 2

It all depends on what you are creating, what your target audience is, which type of devices are used for accessing your application etc

If you are creating something that has to be really lightweight, for example, something that must be browsable on mobile devices, then you should consider how much of the code is executed in the browser, keep that end light and do the heavy work on the server side.

If you are creating something that has to be access with text based browsers, then you should keep your site as simple as possible and make sure you have full control of the DOM structure.

If you are creating something that has to be indexed by search engines (an application like an eCommerce site), then you have to remember that applications made with AJAX-based frameworks will not be indexed by search engines, as search engines look at the static content of the page (by which I mean that the content hasn't been modified by javascript). If you really want to use a RIA framework to create you frontend, there are workarounds to enable search engine indexing, but that's a whole another topic.

On the other hand, if you are making a web application, something like an accounting system or the management part of an eCommerce site, then you can and should consider full blown RIA solutions, because these kind of application do not need to be indexed by search engines and they are often (if not always) accessed through a modern browser on a PC or Mac. Popular RIA frameworks include Vaadin, GWT, Wicket, IceFaces etc.

Answer 3

http://www.icefaces.org/JForum/posts/list/8347.page and http://forums.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=5202018

Answer 4

The company that I work for is using AJAX, PHP & MySQL for Web Applications such as Social Networking, Community Sites, Online Booking Applications, etc. on a Standard Comentum Framework (MVC).

For Ecommerce Applications, we use Zend Framework. I think Zend Framework does a good job preventing programmers from sloppy coding:

http://www.comentum.com/web-application-development.html