[jcastell]

Just a quick question for the ME guys and the mob in general. What are the most popular frameworks out there for web GUI development? Struts has fallen out of favor a bit, but what are the market shares of, say, JSF vs. Spring MVC right now? I ask because a while ago, everyone seemed awfully high on JSF, but we’re in the “functionality now” business, and it was simply WAY too much work to use JSF. On the other hand, our firm is growing, and we need to be able to hire people on the fly, so “boutique” frameworks are not an option, no matter how great they may be.

Lemme know,
-jc

[Riyad Kalla]

jc,
You’d be surprised but for “we need to get work done NOW” shops, Struts is still the choice, even for new projects. A lot of our corporate customers are still on Struts, but for the more daring ones, the buzz seems to be around Spring. With Spring you have two choices, Spring MVC (Very WebWork like plus injection) and Spring WebFlow (entire framework). I’ve only played with MVC and personally saw no big gains to using it over Struts (unless you are a huge Spring junkie and all about the crazy injection/xml-application-configuration thing, then it’s handy), especially if your team is already knowledgeable in Struts and can wip out an app quickly.

I’ve used JSF quite a bit and again, unless you *need* it for something, I would wait until the advantage was obvious enough that you didn’t have to ask other people out there… which usually signifies that you are going to get all sorts of answers depending on who you ask, what they are good at, etc.

That said, folks that don’t like JSF think that the Struts Shale project (or maybe it’s just called Shale) might have some advantages in that it’s another layer of abstraction ontop of JSF, so it might ease some of the pain of JSF.

As for JSF, prepare yourself for insanely script/tag-heavy pages if you aren’t already used to them. You can use Facelets to keep the HTML more “pure”, but that’s just another framework to learn.

Honestly at this point in the game, I don’t see much wrong with using Struts with JSTL and calling it a day. It’s tried and true.

[jcastell]

Thanks for the input. One of the biggest impediments we’re up against is that we do lots of work for government agencies, school systems in particular. And a big part of their funding comes from the feds, with lots of strings attached. One such string is the Americans With Disabilities Act, section 508. It makes JavaScripting less than pleasant. So component frameworks like JSF, Shale, and everything else that has lots of generated JavaScript are not an option for us.

I’ve been leaning toward Spring MVC for a few reasons, among them not having to map form elements as strings, and modularity as well. The monolithic Struts config file has caused issues with some of our developers who don’t understand the concepts of diff and merge (and who will soon be serving my coffee at Starbucks).

-jc

[Riyad Kalla]

JC,
Do keep us posting in what you find, there are a lot of other developers that would find that valuable feedback (especially for teams that can’t jump from framework to framework and need something stable for years to come).

[jcastell]

Riyad,

Regarding a framework, I’m all for the POJO concept. What I want is a domain model that I can build on quickly, and to this point, the combination of Spring and Hibernate seems to suit my needs. Quite frankly, once we overcame the learning curve associated with Hibernate, none of us has looked back. We’re doing the same with Spring now. If I can support multiple RDBMSes and app servers with some simple config changes, I’m a very, very happy guy. Especially if I don’t have to implement some proprietary interface or extend a proprietary class.

-jc

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