IBM/MyFaces JSF vs. Tapestry

["albartell" <albartell@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi All,
 
I am curious to know who out there in the IBM iSeries community is using
JavaServer Faces (IBM's, Apahce's, Oracle's, etc). I recently wrote what I
would consider a medium sized web app (100+ pages) using MyFaces
JSF(http://myfaces.apache.org/) and  really liked working with a frame work
vs. doing raw CGI development. The more I used JSF the more I found things I
really liked and things that have made me switch frameworks.
 
Some of the things I liked were the event driven framework where it was
incredibly easy to tie a component action to a Java method, and I really
liked the prebuilt components that made it easy to do lists of data and
reset field values and such.
 
The things that drove me nuts were the inability to have a ui deisigner
build the pages without having a solid knowledge of the JSF tags (no, you
can't just tell them to use the Websphere tooling and abandon their
Dreamweaver where they are incredibly productive :-). Navigation lacked
flexibility when getting into more complex scenarios. The inability to
easily download a dynamically created file (FacesContext.responseComplete()
issues). There are more but I would be digressing to continue.
 
The alternative I have found is Tapestry
(http://jakarta.apache.org/tapestry/) which takes a less politically correct
way to Java frameworks in that they are built to make the programmer
productive and keeping it simple to build Java web apps. I initially
struggled with Tapestry because I came on-board inbetween releases 3.0 and
4.0 and the docs weren't up to date yet, but now I am gaining momentum and
am excited at the possibilities Tapestry offers over JSF (it fixes some of
the aforementioned problems).
 
So, my question, has anybody else gone down the JSF route and switched to
Tapestry like I am attempting to do?
 
Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com/blog