Experience with JSF on applications for the general public / public customers

[Alex Coles]

Hi,

I am currently beginning work on a digital asset management project which involves two applications - an admin application and a public-facing application. For DAOs and Business Services I will use Hibernate and Spring. I am planning to use JSF for the view layer of the admin application. In fact I've already written a number of custom components and ported some JSP and Coldfusion tags to JSF components. It seems to work pretty well for me, and I feel that JSF is the right direction for this particular application. JSF seems great for B2B applications - or this type of situation - where I'm trying to reproduce a user experience as close as possible to a desktop application.

Where I'd really appreciate knowing of other people's experience is on the use of JSF on applications that are B2C - that have public customers, or are designed with content for members of the public. I was originally going to use Struts for the V-C layers on my public-facing application. However, on certain pages the postback paradigm wouldn't be a problem, and reusing some of the investment in custom components I made on the admin application would be really beneficial. The two big problems though are:

 - I want friendly URLs to take users to certain records from the database: Struts doesn't do any better here really as you can't have nice URLs like /go/to/record/12345 either. Ideally I'd like to see a situation where a user could either get themselves to a record through the JSF navigation flow, or bookmark a easy-to-remember URL. I suppose my probable solution here would be to write a custom servlet that takes URL parameters then forward to JSF.

- CommandButtons and CommandLinks are great for administrative GUIs, but Search Engines don't index them and so the webpage won't get crawled.
How religiously should I follow the CommandLink paradigm? If I only want to use postback for one component on the page, and want everything else to use HTTP GET should I stick with JSF? Yes, I could use UIOutputLInk, but maybe I'm just going too far in bending JSF and there are more appropriate frameworks out there!


Comments from anyone who's had similar thoughts - or needs would be really appreciated!

Many thanks,

Alex