JSF (and friends) tags vs. traditional html tags

Question

So this question came up today and I didn't have a specific or scientific answer.

What are the costs associated with using jsf (or tomahawk, faclets, etc., etc.) tags in place of traditional html tags. My gut reaction is that you should use jsf tags in situations where you need the additional functionality they provide, and use traditional tags when you don't. Also I feel like jsf tags would require more resources (since the server has to take them and rerender them as html anyways) than html. Does anybody know what the cost actually is (as far as time and memory)? Also useful information is what is the convention that is in use, pure jsf or a mixture of the two?

Answer 1

A JSF page gets compiled upon first request (or pre-compiled if you specify that in the config). Thus, it's not like the page needs to be parsed every time it's requested. I don't have any specific numbers relating to time/cpu/memory cost, but I'm sure it's negligible.

Answer 2

Sure there is a cost. Whether that is noticeable or negligible depends on the hardware and the load of the server in question. Profile it and upgrade the server if necessary.

You should however realize that on the other hand you save time and cost compared to implementing the same without help of a component based MVC framework. That's going to be a lot of boilerplate code gathering the paramters, doing validations, conversions, updating model values which is possibly not written efficient as compared to existing and widely used MVC frameworks.

The Sun JSF development team puts performance as high priority and Mojarra is already optimized as much as possible.

Answer 3

Our site http://www.skill-guru.com runs on JSF/ Tomahawk / Rich faces on a tomcat server. We do not see any speed issues here. As Jeff pointed out , it all gets compiled so there is not much noticeable difference until and unless you really use too much rich faces or other fancy stuff. JSF does help you make your life easy.