Apache MyFaces 1.1.1

Java Server Faces (JSF) has been at its 1.0 state since 2004. I am surprised that the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has made extremely quick progress with its MyFaces project. They just released MyFaces 1.1.1 yesterday, 10/27/2005.

I checked out JSF last year when Java Studio Creator (JSC) first came out and due to other reasons did not have the time to really do a lot of research with it. For some reason, today I was looking around the web and decided to do some reading about MyFaces. Well, I went to the "Getting Started" page and spent about an hour reading these documents. MyFaces 1.1.1 is quite impressive.

I think I am going to have to get into MyFaces technology in 2006 since it embraces the open source theory. Sun's JSF is great however, when they released Java Studio Creator (JSC), it was somewhat crippled and not quite as open as I would have liked. It did not have as much database connectivity to make it practical. Additionally, Sun started charging $99 to continue using JSC. At least that was the last I recall. I have not really used it much this year. I just sort of lost interest. I am sure it is evolving further.

Here are some reviews of JSC 2004Q2 release, "First Look: Sun Java Studio Creator (Early Access)", "Sun Java Studio Creator Early Access Release".

Now back to MyFaces. Is there an Eclipse plug-in for MyFaces? I haven't seen one yet. I am sure this is under heavy research in the open source community. Now that would be nice since I do most of my Java development within Eclipse. If someone builds a very nice integrated Eclipse plug-in for MyFaces, then I am quite sure it will take off as an MVC framework within the Java community. Struts is nice, however, it is not component-based development which JSF and MyFaces has been built to solve. I am still looking for the Delphi of web development.

In the summer of 2004, I predicted that JSF would be much farther ahead than it is today in Oct2005. I was definitely wrong on that one. What I did not anticipate was an ASF project, MyFaces, making as much progress as it has in such a short period of time.