Are there any popular and/or public websites that utilize the JavaServer Faces framework? I don't ever recall stumbling across any ever on the Internet. In my experience JavaServer Faces is usually reserved for non-public enterprise and business level applications.
I am curious to know because I am researching how terrible of an idea it would be to construct - for example - an online dating website utilizing MVC with JSF and (let's say for the sake of argument) EJB 3.0.
I think you are going about it wrong. Don't go into such research with a negative attitude until you know the pros and cons of the available options. We use JSP and JSF at my job, and I can say that we are NOT a big enterprisy company (and while we are quite profitable, we also aren't a hip social network).
I know of a couple of big sites using JSF. I'd say it's great that you don't find any big sites using it, because a user is not supposed to know about the underlying technology.
Although I've worked on those sites and I know about them using JSF, personally I wouldn't recommend using it. For me the component model doesn't really hold it's promises.
This may help: http://wiki.java.net/bin/view/Projects/RealWorldJSFLinks
I just started using quicken online, and it appears to use both Java Server faces and ext-js. I've been pretty impressed with it so far.
I helped build earthlink.net - that's pure JSF, using facelets.
We also spent months thinking about what the right architecture was for us, and how to best interoperate with the other parts of the company. JSF was right for us because we were consuming lots of internal services, and the component architecture worked well for the persistent page elements (addresses, dynamic pricing, etc).
I'm also building a social network in JSF that runs on top of a java-based content management system; again, the modular components work well in an architecture that's oriented around lots of small widgets.
JSF can be quite annoying to work with- if I was trying to build yet another dating service, I might not use it unless the design called for lots of small components interacting with each other throughout your interaction with the site. Otherwise, I'd just blast it out in struts 2 (or even Grails).
https://www.chicagoestatus.com/eStatus/login.faces?brandName=chicago
Under the flag ship of FNF this is one project which is built on JSF. It looks good with a clean user interface and some of the things I am also involved in.
The project I am currently working on is using JSF. The technology was selected by a previous employee, who has since left the company. The rational was that we would be able to build the presentation tier of the application quickly. This proved to be false, in addition to the fact that there were many requirements from the users that we could not implement because of limitations of JSF.
The team came to the conclusion that JSF may be good for building quick mock-ups of applications, but when it comes to building a full-scale application, you would be better off using Struts instead (which is what the rest of the applications our team is responsible for use).
The site Law Office Portal uses JSF.
I will say one thing about JSF, you have to keep an eye on memory. Scoping is always something you want to be careful about (dont load up session or application scope), but JSF can be a bit of a hog. With that said, it's done well.
I don't see why it would be a 'bad idea' to use JSF. You will need to address issues with any framework you use.
Although, I don't see why you'd want to use EJB for your scenerio.
Good luck!
I\m a developer at a pretty big online bank and we are about to use JSF. The way to go is to use JBoss Seam on top of JSF. I can really recommend Seam, without it, JSF is pretty much a hassle.