Re: Facelets 1.2

by Mikhail Grushinskiy-2 :: Rate this Message:

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I've been using facelets with JSF over a year and it IS much better than JSP with JSF. However there is number of limitations:

1. Facelets source tag (which is very important feature) have problems with EL expression evaluation such as validation
    doesn't work if component is defined in the source tag

2. Source tag only support value binding. So if you need to pass action binding into tag via EL get ready to do some hacks in Java

3. Packaging of user defined source tag into jar is not documented (so there is a lot of time required to resolve this if you need to)

4. c:if causes major confusion (as it is evaluated not at render time)

5. It would be nicer if EL functions library was more elaborate than now. I have to constantly create new very basic functions
    as concat, trim and so on

6. Including output of legacy JSP output into produced page is a pain

7. All JSF components libraries have to have taglib.xml file to work with facelets (and they usually do not provide it in
   distributions ex: tomahawk, woodstock) So the barrier to start using it is quite steep due to configuration issues

8. Let's imagine you wrote big library of source tags. How would you document it for you customer? input attributes are not defined
    anywhere.

9. There is no way to validate things at compile time. You actually have to test every page for things like if your bean or property exists
   and you spelled it properly. This is largely JSF problem too.

10. There are many things which could be improved (ex something like defining common interface (set of attributes) for number of tags)
Currently there is no way of doing it. And there is no progress in improvements

11. Performance and memory utilization could have been better (as always, and which is largely JSF problem (look at Google web toolkit)).

12. Might it is time to take some advantage in facelets of using Java 5 features

I'm sure other people can add to this list

JBoss Seam progress is heavily dependent on facelets so might be JBoss could to something to remedy the situation with lack of evolution in current facelets.

Facelets is a very good project which now suffers due to lack of evolution which it needs.

Please, keep it going...
Thanks

On 6/1/07, Ian Hlavats <ian@...> wrote:

Hi Jason,

When you say attach the patch, can we simply copy and paste source code into the issue report, or is there a specific format you are looking for (eg. diff command output)?

For example, here is an issue I filed back in January complete with source code that has yet to be resolved:

https://facelets.dev.java.net/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=205

I would love to be a Facelets committer and have been around on the list reporting issues since well before Facelets 1.0. :-)

Where do I sign up for CVS commit rights?

Ian

--
Ian Hlavats

FaceletsTools for Dreamweaver

http://www.jsftoolbox.com/products/facelets

From: Jason Lee [mailto:jason@...]
Sent: Friday, June 01, 2007 9:54 AM
To: users@...
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Facelets 1.2

On 6/1/07, Cracauer, Dave <dcracauer@...> wrote:

Talking about specific bugs and whether or not the current version is 'good enough' misses the point in my opinion. To me, the real issue is that Facelets really isn't being worked on, and users have no way of providing patches.

I hate to be pedantic, but you *do* have a way to submit patches: file an issue and attach the patch. Getting it applied might be trickier, but I'm sure with a little persistence, it wouldn't be too hard to get commit privs to the tree.

--
Jason Lee, SCJP
JSF RI Dev Team
http://blogs.steeplesoft.com

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