Which framework should I choose - Seam, Wicket, JSF or GWT? [closed]

Answer 1

The only one of those I've used is JSF, so I won't be able to give you feedback on the others, but here's my take on JSF. In my experience, the minute we converted from JSF in JSP to JSF in facelets, life got MUCH easier, so I'll focus around facelets. Also, It looks like Seam and JSF are not mutually exclusive.

Pros:

• Creating facelets xhtml components is simple, which promotes re-use.
• Decent templating abilities using built in tags like ui:insert, ui:include, and ui:decorate
• Simple access to Spring beans through faces-config
• XHTML based so web developers unfamiliar with java can still be effective
• Good widget library available in tomahawk/trinidad

Cons:

• Post requests only. This can make bookmarking difficult.
• Not as built-in ajax-y as GWT, but this may be fixed if used with Seam

I'm by no means an expert in JSF/Facelets, so I'm sure there are others I've missed. Hopefully someone else will also elaborate.

Update for JSF 2.0:

• Has even better re-use capabilities with composite components
• Widget libraries for 2.0 include primefaces and mojarra scales
• Allows get requests and bookmarking
• Has built in Ajax support
• See http://andyschwartz.wordpress.com/2009/07/31/whats-new-in-jsf-2/ for more on JSF 2

Answer 2

My experience is, in chronological order:

Raw servlets - (yeah, lot's of hard work but the it was early days and we were eager beavers!)

JSP - I thought it was the beez neez at the time it came out (if we only knew ;) )

Echo - Awesome framework but not for pages that need to be search engine friendly (same problem with GWT)

Wicket - Awesome framework - the developers fully understand the concept of OO (unlike JSP and many others) and have applied all the usual OO niceties to this framework. If you appreciate 'reusability', if you appreciate encapsulation, if you appreciate separation of concerns and if you like to bind your model to the UI code without having to worry about object marshalling and other such ugliness then this is the framework for you!

Answer 3

I've used Wicket and GWT pretty heavily. Never really learned to love Wicket.

My ego blogged about it http://salk31.blogspot.com/2009/07/wicket-ajax.html

Looking at GWT 2.0 uiBinder today reminded me how annoying it was in Wicket to have to match the XML component tree with the one created in Java. The GWT spin on this looks vastly better to me.

I've not used Wicket for over a year so maybe they have fixed a lot of this but given modern browser and JS support I can't see the point of doing all this on the server (I know, I know data locality).

Answer 4

JSF is deprecated (JSF is not even listed as a framework to compare when evangelists compare or talk about web frameworks in 2010).

Now full fledge large scale applications are created using GWT, YUI, JQuery etc.

Read some articles over google and above will be obvious.

(ALL JOBS on JSF are to support legacy applications).

Answer 5

I've used GWT since version 1.4 and JSF since the 2.0 spec came out.

GWT is a client-side framework, it generates JavaScript from Java. Your architecture would be a pure client-server, which means:

• Best to use coarse-grained services
• All objects that travel to the client side should be fully serializable (it means there's no lazy load, or OpenSessionInView pattern)
• Since GWT 2.0 you can design your gui using xhtml, which is much easier in regards to styling & structuring HTML
• GWT tends to favour good architecture, if you mess it up it will be bad to refactor
• Perfect History (browser back button, bookmarkable urls) support is hard, you probably have to roll your own, although it's easy to hack something right up front

JSF is a component-based framework, with a view-first design (code-behind if you like):

• It's easier to do some type of webapps (stateful, like shopping cart)
• JSF+Seam have suport for conversations (think wizard-like pages that maintain state across several pages)
• You can implement OpenSessionInView, depending on your stack. It's probably not recommended if you use EJB for service/business layer
• JSF2 has superb support for AJAX, and with a component suite like RichFaces you can build nice webapps
  • But if you want exquisite javascript behaviour, you'll have to write some javascript
• JSF tracks the current UI state in client or server-side. This is a tradeoff between network traffic or server memory.

Resume:

• GWT is more adequate for web applications (think gmail) that require the best client-side performance. It's easy to write custom components (you write Java) and since your server-side is just a service layer you can be fully stateless on the server side.
• JSF is more adequate for mostly CRUD applications that are better suited for component-oriented stuff: think a hotel/flight reservation system, an online store with a shopping cart, etc

Answer 6

I know it's a bit late but there is already lot of comparison on Framewrok, espcially this one, wich occured durinf Devox 2010 conf :

http://www.devoxx.com/display/Devoxx2K10/Comparing+JVM+Web+Frameworks

This should help you to choose :)