Seam integration with non JSF based presentation frameworks

[gavin.king]

My understanding is that facelets has some level of support for the tapestry style of doing things. But I also know Jacob has some pretty sophisticated arguments for why the JSF approach is better than the Tapestry approach. I don't currently have a strong view, and I suspect it is probably a matter of taste.

Again, we would like to support tapestry, but it is not the highest priority right now, unless someone is willing to step up and help implement it.

[hookomjj]

My honest opinion on the matter is quite lengthy, but you can read a bit here:

http://weblogs.java.net/blog/jhook/archive/2005/07/programmer_frie_1.html

or

http://hookom.blogspot.com/2005/09/more-on-programmer-pages.html

or

http://hookom.blogspot.com/2004/12/easing-project-development-with-css.html

To give you an example, the JBoss Seam Demo was done using this practice. I created HTML templates, using CSS for all the design work. The rest of Gavin's JSF pages were labeled with my CSS styles/classes and everything was now 'sexy'. As Gavin continued, he was able to create new pages that instantly looked like the rest of the pages, while only dealing with grainular JSF components-- no need to futz with HTML details in the presentation. When Gavin needed something changed, I just dove into the CSS file, separate from whatever he was doing within his JSF pages. Easy. I just don't get why others aren't doing this yet.

-- Jacob

[werpu]

Facelets indeed add tapestry style templating within the JSF realm. I do not see Tapestry or web part templating as CSS killer or vice versa, they both cover different domains. Tapestry like templating just allows the componentization of web parts within a plain view or view with a simplified controller approach, while JSF tries to provide an entire component infrastructure in this area.

JSF simply tries to be a real UI library which also renders html, and basically succeeds.

One advantage of CSS is that it really forces you to use CSS if you are in the html realm, and that is a good thing.

[hookomjj]

"werpu" wrote:
Facelets indeed add tapestry style templating within the JSF realm. I do not see Tapestry or web part templating as CSS killer or vice versa, they both cover different domains. Tapestry like templating just allows the componentization of web parts within a plain view or view with a simplified controller approach, while JSF tries to provide an entire component infrastructure in this area.

You are totally correct. If you get a chance, check out some of the UserTag and composition functionality with Facelets:

https://facelets.dev.java.net/nonav/docs/dev/docbook.html#taglib-create-source

Really, what JSF allows in combination with Facelets is that you really are blurrying th lines of what a 'page' is. Instead you can just pull any number of components in and re-use them in different views on any given request.

"werpu" wrote:
One advantage of JSF is that it really forces you to use CSS if you are in the html realm, and that is a good thing.

Yeah, it really is. Doing some of the demo work with JBoss's developers has proven this HTML/JSF and CSS separation to be extremely efficient in practice.

[mnesarco]

"cjalmeida" wrote:
IMHO, throwing away the mature the HTML editors out there is/was a very bad decison of JSF ppl.

That's why I really like other presentation frameworks like Tapestry and Wicket.

So, will Seam be able to support those kind of tools?

The Seam-Wicket integration has been officially started at wicket-stuff (https://wicket-stuff.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/wicket-stuff/trunk/).

See this blog: http://www.ibstaff.net/fmartinez/?p=41 to get the binary and a convenient trivial example project.