August 11, 2005
JSF Evolution: The Promise of Version 1.2
Having recently returned to exploring JSF, I was interested this morning to read Matt Raible's informative article, Challenges in the J2EE Web Tier.
Amongst other things, Matt highlighted significant improvements coming in version 1.2 of JSF.
One is the Unified Expression Language, which combines both the ${...} style JSP EL with the #{...} style JSF EL, ensuring that both can be used together. This is good news because JSTL has been one of the major improvements of JSP, and it's problematic compatibility with JSF EL is a drawback of the current version of JSF (1.1). Indeed, the major thrust of JSF 1.2 is it's alignment with JSP 2.1.
Another improvement on the horizon is JSF 1.2's support for HTML templates. In this context, Matt alludes to an open source project called Facelets, a development that I will be interested to monitor.
Anyway, I recommend Matt's article. It's worth a read. Roll on J2EE 5.0!
Posted to Software Development by Keith Pitty