Unfortunately I have to run out to do some things this afternoon, and
can't reply in as much detail as I'd like to the below, but I'll quickly
comment...
Werner Punz wrote the following on 1/11/2006 10:51 AM:
Hi Rick the confusion you are talking about, is basically the same you
have by jumping onto any framework.
I don't think that is the case. You might have trouble getting started
with say Struts or Webwork but you are basically just looking up stuff
on working with that 'framework' - You aren't having to discern "Can I
just use JSF out of the box (whatever that box even is, as I forgot now
how you even get just vanilla JSF)?" "Do I need MyFaces?" "Do I need
"Oracle ADF?" "Do I need Shale?" Trust me I understand no new framework
is really easy to learn but I'd like most of my framework to be self
contained in jars related exactly "to" that framework. I understand with
Struts I might want to get iBATIS or hibernate working with it, or maybe
even Spring, but those areas are really truly separate from say Struts.
I don't seem to get the same experience when trying to learn about JSF.
Mind you that I had to move from JSF to Struts for a project a while
ago, and I had the same feeling backwards ;-)
I would really have liked to see the path you took to figuring out
Struts. One of the nice things about Struts is A) You don't have to use
all of the features at once and B) you can always fall back on the basic
JSF/ServletAPI to bail you out when in a time crunch. In JSF can I use
JSTL to create an simple form input that I'll be able to easily process
in my backing bean using request.getParemeter(..) if I wanted? I'm
guessing there is a way, but I doubt it would be that intuitive.
A very good entry point into jsf is:
www.jsftutorials.net/
I've looked at some of those before and I wasn't very impressed. I
wasn't able to find an example of doing typical CRUD stuff... which is
why when I found out just enough to be dangerous I wrote my own lesson
http://www.learntechnology.net/jsf-crud.do to try to at least represent
something someone might be doing in 'real life' but yet kept simple.
(Actually I'd appreciate if you downloaded and tried it out - there is
one part there that I really need fixed.. when you resort it runs into
problems when clicking on the row to edit/delete).
But as is I can say, get a good book, there you have the info mostly
centralized and preprepared for learning
(Although I cannot give the Kito book a good recommendation as entry
point, due to the fact, that it overwhelms you with sideinformation, it
is excellent as reference literature though, and probably the best
coverage of jsf technologywise, although much stuff in there nowadays
can be solved easier)
Maybe I'll try that one. I tried another one (not going to name names)
and I found the first 3 or 4 chapters helpful after that it was mostly
just chapter after chapter of using components.
And yes you cannot get anything worthwile done without any component or
extension pack, it is simply due to the fact that basic jsf limits
itself to the html controls, you get with basic jsf basically the same
set of components and to some degree functionality as with basic Struts.
But one of the points of JSF is the component packs, and I think it
should be more propagized that if you want to use JSF, also look for
components, otherwise you will be in for a dissapointment.
ADF as well as Tomahawk and others already are very extensive in their
user interface coverage, and things become better every month.
Agreed, you need those component packs to do anything worthwhile and yet
those component packs almost become as a critical to understand as the
framework itself, which adds to way more confusing. If someone wrote an
application with MyFaces components and some other team used some other
components it's not going to be easy to just switch around. For example
I had to use the Tomahawk <t:saveState ...> tag .. does Oracle ADF have
that? It drastically changes what you can do within the form when you
use t:saveState. And yes, all those guys do a great job putting out new
things, but what if you don't want to wait for a component to be
enhanced? It's not like you can just jump out and code that part with
straight HTML and that's the part I find frustrating.
Sort off-topic but what do you use in JSF to create a display of List
data from a managedBean? I believe I was told to use DataTable and
that's what I used in my lesson, but I thought that was rather limiting.
Maybe I want to create a bunch of divs and don't want to be using
t:column. Is there a Component equivalent of a simple forEach loop that
works well with managedBean list content?
Please don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-JSF - I really like a LOT of it.
I just wish there was some kind of effort to bring a lot of this
together into one 'framework' - I know this goes against a lot of the
open source thinking, but if Shale is that useful, which I believe it
is, I'd like to see maybe absorbed into something like MyFaces.. is that
a possibility? It's just confusing about what you truly need to get to
be productive.
--
Rick
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