What are the main disadvantages of Java Server Faces 2.0?

Question

Yesterday I saw a presentation on Java Server Faces 2.0 which looked truly impressive, even though I am currently a happy ASP.NET MVC / jQuery developer. What I liked most a

Answer 1

Commenting on my last few months of Primefaces/JSF experience:

• If you can use components "off the shelf", I guess it's not terrible.
• However, it doesn't play well as soon as you step outside and need custom UIs. - For example, we needed to use Twitter's bootstrap for our project. (Not primefaces bootstrap).
  • Now our pages work as follows:
    • Page loads.
    • User interacts with a Primefaces that has ajax functionality
    • Bootstrap's javascript bindings break
    • We run extra javascript to rebind everything

The promise of JSF to avoid writing javascript turned into writing more javascript than we would have if not using Primefaces--and that javascript to is fix what Primefaces breaks.

It's a time sink--unless you again use "off the shelf" stuff. Also really ugly (Primefaces) when having to work with Selenium. It can all be done--but again--there's only so much time.

Definitely avoid this if you're working with a UX/design team and need to rapidly iterate on the UI--you can save time by learning jquery/writing straight HTML--or looking at react/angular.