Java Component based vs Request based frameworks

Question

I was recently asked in an interview - In java, how do you compare component based frameworks to request based frameworks? I explained EJB as an example of Component based f

Answer 1

JSF is component based java API, as said Nate, Struts is an action based framework, the Http requests are parsed, while processing the actions in the end the controler Servlet forwards the request to the JSP that will be responsible to generate the response. While in JSF which became a standard for component based web frameworks, there is actually no need to process the requests and the responses as all we need is to write JSP or XHTML pages, bind the components used in the page or the value they should render to properties in backing beans or managed beans and the FacesServlet (controller) does all the job to care about request parsing and redirecting to the JSP that will render the response based on navigation rules specified in faces-config.xml . So as you can see there is a big difference between Struts and JSF as JSF brings a component-event based approach while Struts is more close to the classic JSP/Servlet model. Another thing jpartogi have said the creator of JSF and struts is the same, I just want to mention that Struts is a framwork owned by Apache community while JSF is an API specified by JCP in the JSR-127 for the version 1.1 and JSR-252 for the version 1.2 and has different implementations (SUN-RI, Apache MyFaces...)