Hi! First of all, congratz on the good job. Shale looks very promising. We are currently implementing JSF in my organization. I already knew about Shale but I hadn't checked its progress in a while and I must say I am impressed so far. Actually, I stumbled upon the project while I was looking for a way to build in a quick way new UI components. The idea of creating 3 different classes each time to be able to aggregate some already existing UI components didn't sound particulary attractive. And that's how I found the "goodies" of Shale.
Anyway, to make it short, I am experimenting Clay's feature right now but I am a little bit confused. There seems to be a bit of overlap between Tiles and Clay features? Am I correct? And if it's true, is it a better choice to keep using Tiles as my layout manager or should I do it the Tapestry's way and treat everything as a UI component with the help of Clay? Another thought that keeps rambling through my head is a question concerning the backing beans design. I have red on many blogs entries that one of the greatest strength of JSF is the fact that the backing beans don't have to implements any interfaces. But if you want to take advantage of Shake "page level" services infrastructure (the view package), your beans have to implement the ViewController interface. Don't get me wrong, I think those services are great tools but I was wondering if all the beans should be "ViewController" instances or just when it is absolutly necessary? Finally, another concern I have with this approach is that it's kind of suggesting you to write one bean for each page of the application (using a 1:1 mapping). From all the research I have done in the JSF area, I have not been able to find a consensus about wich approach to use when designing backing bean. Actually, it's hard to find some documentation on backing beans design but I think it's one of the challenges Struts developpers (as I am) face when moving to JSF. I would like to hear from the Shale users or/and developpers their opinion on the subject? Any advantage or downside? Thank for any hints! Really appreciated! *Sorry for any mistakes I made but english isn't my native language. -- Alexandre Poitras Québec, Canada
