Stay the fuck away from JSF . I have had to deal with this piece of shit since version 1.0. It is because the J2EE enterprise App Servers and tooling vendors have managed to convince big corporate CIOs that JSF equals programmer productivity.It is such a lie but who's gonna tell the emperor he is naked ? JSF still has issues with concurrency and memory usage. And forget about adding new ajax widgets to your page without tearing out what is left of your hair. You will write 50 lines of javascript widgets code and then a million lines of wrappers for your widget. You can't even see what your UI looks like without writing a ton of stubbing code. I could go on but my hair is on fire just thinking about all the shit I have had too deal with when using JSF.
Have to agree, JSF is the worst kind of J2EE committee-designed, overengineered nonsense. It is the EJB of web frameworks. The component-based philosophy behind it is sound, but is much better executed by frameworks like Tapestry and Wicket.
That said, modern web apps are all about fat JavaScript clients, enabled by much better frameworks, GWT being one of them.
Having been part of a team developing JSF components in the 1.x days, couldn't agree more.
A few hacks enabling us to use it alongside Facelets, made the whole experience better, but it still left much to be desired. Specially when tracking down bugs related to components misbehaving.
I did revisit the JSF world a couple of months ago and am quite happy that it only lasted a few weeks.
Nowadays I will advise anyone against it. Just use pure JSP with taglibs or any other Java web stack that embraces the HTTP way of working.
