Frameworks, oh my!

Earlier this evening, I was having a little chat with my good friend and development wizard Chris. I was chatting with him about a recent frustration with the world of certain "Frameworks".

As I proceed forward in a software engineering class project involving an application built on JavaServer Faces running on top of GlassFish, I found myself reminded on this rant someone sent me a link to recently. While I ultimately have a far more balanced view, I do find his rambling somewhat amusing.

So anyways, here's my rant:

After a group meeting for my class, it looks like the most sensible way to design our web pages for this web app is essentially a templated composite view, so we can have standard headers, sidebars, etc, without having to code them on each page.

As such, I start looking up how to do them properly in the context of JSF (JavaServer Faces), which conventionally uses JSP (JavaServer Pages) for its page description system.

Then I start reading that you can do it this way, or that way, but that those ways all have problems for this reason or that reason.

In fact, most conventional documents on how to use JSF ignore the problem completely.

But when they discount all the obvious ways, they then recommend this alternate page composition system called "Facelets".

So I start reading up on Facelets, and it says how they use XHTML instead of JSP, because JSP is bad for this reason or that reason, especially with JSF, and talk all about how Facelets and JSF go wonderfully together.

As such, I look into what it'll take to have Facelets integrate cleanly with my chosen IDE (NetBeans), which I chose because it integrates so well with the other ways I was trying to do things.

I discover a NetBeans plugin that'll let me to Facelets, and provide all that tag-completion on the XHTML files that I was getting in the JSP files. Only problem is that its at version 0.3.

I install it anyways, and finally figure it all out.

In the end, Facelets has turned out to actually be a very nice solution, and I'm really happy with it.

(and since JSF supports plugable page composition systems, it integrates cleanly and correctly too)

But, given that JSF seemed to start from the basis of "we see all these other frameworks out there designed to fix/improve-upon what JSP provides", I wonder why I didn't start with reading about Facelets.

(and in general, I'm actually quite pleased with the whole JSF approach)

I just wish Facelets got more coverage in my JSF-bible-type book (published last month, co-authored by one of the spec leads). All it got was a few examples in the short chapter on plugable page rendering libraries.