What's the best JSF implementation?

Question

Hey everyone,

I currently have a medium size Java web application sitting on top of Spring MVC. As much as I like (no sarcasm) coding straight HTML, CSS and JS, it's not possible for me to develop as fast as I'd like.

I'm looking at different RAD frameworks to speed up my development. I'm looking at JSF implementations and component libraries, Flex, GWT and a few others.

As of now, Apache MyFaces (with ICEFaces) seems to be the front runner in my mind, but I'm curious to find out what you all think of that specific implementation and if the Sun implementation is any better? What about other component libraries?

What's important to me is something that is stable, has an active community and that it doesn't look like there is another technology in the near future that is going to eclipse JSF (which would drive me to use a different RAD framework).

Thanks in advance for the responses.

Answer 1

My government agency is going with ICEFaces. I wasn't involved in the analysis of the open source component libraries.

At the moment, it's not practical to mix and match component libraries, but I've heard that ICEFaces is modifying its architecture to be more compatible with MyFaces.

Answer 2

Core Implementations:

• Mojarra (by Sun/Oracle)
• MyFaces (by Apache)

Component libraries:

• Richfaces (by Exadel/Jboss)
• IceFaces
• PrimeFaces

As far as I know, all of the component libraries support all of the core implementations. Personally I go with Mojarra as I can't yet see a reason to stray from the reference implementation. And I use Richfaces which I find very easy to use.

A lot of people would scoff at the notion of calling any JSF framework a "RAD" approach. The develop/deploy cycle is too long for this IMO (even with hot deploy). The cool kids are all using the Play Framework which looks very RAD (pun intended).

Answer 3

For PrimeFaces, take a look at the whyprimefaces page that has real life experiences of the PrimeFaces Community members.

http://www.primefaces.org/whyprimefaces.html