In part two of my series of podcasts on why I’m not interested in using JSF in the future, I focus on the Leaky Abstraction that it provides. I feel like the leaks get in the way of getting actual work done; they confuse new developers, and cause headaches for everyone. Users even see the results of the leaking.
Download JSF Part 2.
Some of the leaks I discuss include:
- Ultimately, JSF provides a Leaky Abstraction that (in spite of its promise) still requires all developers to understand Request-Response in addition to the 6 lifecycle phases.
- Security in the web.xml is based around URL, and by definition you don’t know the URL for many JSF actions. This makes it MUCH harder to get the fine-grained security right, but also expose the basic servlet (think Request-Response) nature of the application.
- Users may refresh a page, like the Search Results, and be whirled away to the search entry page - their results having been scattered to the wind.
My point isn’t that these items can’t be dealt with, but that the core abstraction leaks somewhat and I prefer to do without it. I have many choices of Java web frameworks. I’d rather be solving the business problems - those are by far more important. Please see previous posts here and here.
UPDATE:The third and final part of the series is now posted.
