I have been to the JSFDays 08 in Vienna for the last three days and know I am starting to sort out all the information I got there.

I did not use JSF in a real project until know although I read the O’Reily book on JavaServer Faces more than three years ago. The main motivation for going to the JSFDays was that I am really unsatisfied with the currently available frameworks for building the UI of Java web applications.

The last projects I worked on mostly used Struts 1.x or Spring MVC. Like in many web projects that are currently under construction there had to be some sort of dynamic behavior and AJAX. So I used prototype, miraculous, jsonlib, ajaxtags and many more. But the whole process took a lot of manual effort and I was not satisfied with this way – although the results were correct.

In his keynote Ed Burns talked about the history of network aware applications. The conclusion of the keynote was that is important to use the ontology of UI styles to put things in buckets – to classify them. In the Q&A session after the keynote everybody agreed that the possibility to render components different for special devices (like mobiles) is not as important as initially thought (this was one of the ideas behind the JSF spec).

For me the keynote made clear what the idea behind JSF really is. It is not just another web application framework like Struts, WebWork, WebObjects or Tabestry. Sun tried to define a standard for how to build components of a web UI. This should allow different vendors to provide components based on the same standard so that developers may choose between them. The problem with JSF standards 1.1 and 1.2 was that it did not define enough to fulfill the users needs. The component frameworks that were created had to add a lot of features “outside” of the specification and this led to the incompatibility problems between the available libraries. The website jsfmatrix.net shows the result of this.

In the second session on Wednesday Jürgen Höller talked about new features in Spring 2.5 and how they could be used in a JSF environment. There were a lot of interesting new configuration options by using annotations I did not know. After the talk a discussion took place about what configurations should be done in external XML files and which configurations are better done with annotations.

Max Katz demonstrated how powerful the JBoss RichFaces are. They include over 70 components and provide nice AJAX features out of the box. It was a really impressing. I definitely have to give the JBoss tools a try when there is time. Max has also done a good comparison of available RIA tools with this article.

Matthias Wessendorf did a nice presentation of Oracle ADF Faces Rich Client. It seems like Oracle has put lot of energy into these components. They allow to create a very rich web interface.

In the fourth session Kito Mann showed us how scripting languages like Ruby or Groovy could be used in a JavaServer Faces application. Kito is running jsfcentral.com, a good place for finding information about JSF. He is also member of the JSF experts group and has written the book JavaServer Faces in Action.

On the second day Thomas Spiegl and Mario Ivankovits talked about JSF@work. They used Orchestra to resolve some common problems of JSF applications. Orchestra provides additional scopes (like a conversation scope) and other things. There is a website containing information about the small project they used for demonstration.

Alexander Jesse showed how he and his team use Selenium, JSFUnit and easymock to test JSF applications. I never used Selenium but it looks good, for me watij did the job.

Manfred Geiler used AOP to extend domain objects so that they could be used in a JSF view. A very interesting way to solve common demands. He is working on a library that will add the required utility classes which will be released as OpenSource.

In the BOF at on Friday some information about the future release of JSF 2.0 was showed. There will be an early draft available by the end of April.

The slides of the presentations are now available on the conference site. I added the pictures I made of the conference to my flickr account.