Women in Technology

Article:		Improving JSF by Dumping JSP
Subject:		Just one problem...
Date:		2004-06-10 07:31:24
From:		Kamau
The current version of JSF does nothing for High Availability (HA) mission critical application development! I was shocked to discover (several months later after successfully pitching JSF to a new employer) that there is NO httpsession replication capability in JSF (the JSF Tree cannot be serialized). Meaning that any production applications the require scalability and failover CANNOT be written using the JSF framework. Moreover, the Sun position on this gaping hole is less than inspiring (see JSF forum http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jsp?forum=427&thread=497264&tstart=0&trange=15). What a bummer! I guess JSF is not intended to mission-critical applications but is instead just another "departmental" app framework.

Showing messages 1 through 2 of 2.

• Just one problem...
  2004-06-10 13:45:34  edburns [View]
  
  
  
  K> The current version of JSF does nothing for High Availability (HA)
  K> mission critical application development! I was shocked to discover
  K> (several months later after successfully pitching JSF to a new
  K> employer) that there is NO httpsession replication capability in JSF
  K> (the JSF Tree cannot be serialized). Meaning that any production
  K> applications the require scalability and failover CANNOT be written
  K> using the JSF framework.
  
  That's not true, because JSF applications shouldn't be trying to persist
  UI state anyway. The ValueBinding API, and the Expression Language that
  exposes it to your application, is intended to be used to you to have
  your UI pull values from anywere, including HA data sources.
  
  Now, sure, one could provide an implementation of StateManager to make
  this automatic, but the need for this implies an inappropriately
  designed application, since one should minimize the amount of UI state
  kept in the client.
  
  Ed (JSR-127 EG member)

• Just one problem...
  2004-06-10 09:53:21  Hans Bergsten | [View]
  
  
  As described by Adam Winer in that forum thread, this is not a JSF specification problem, it's a problem with the JSF reference implementation. Other JSF implementations, such as those coming from the application server vendors or open source projects like MyFaces, can easily provide a StateManager implementations that don't have this problem.
  
  Please, don't confuse the "specification" with the "implementation". Java specification reference implementations are typically not intended to be used in production, they are intended to prove that the spec can be implemented, and can also be used as the starting point for "real" implementations (depending on how they are licensed, of course).