2 Replies Latest reply on Dec 18, 2008 9:05 PM by andhdo

    Discussion about future of RIA (GWT vs JSF vs Flex)

      What do you think is the future of rich internet applications? At the moment there are several competiting
      approaches like pure JavaScript clients (Google web toolkit, gwt-ext), JSF based frameworks (i. e. richfaces, icefaces) or other technologies like Flex/JavaFX and so forth. Every technology has its own advanatges and disadvantages but the very good thing is, that all approaches are supported by seam (seam remoting).


      What do you think is important for any RIA framework in the near future? Some of our customers asks us for something like "offline versions" because they also want to use our application without the need for an Internet access. I guess this would become more and more importance. Unfortunately, offline versions are impossible with JSF.


      I am also evaluating the above mentioned different technologies for a new project. I've done two other projects with jsf and richfaces but at the moment I drift to gwt and gwt-ext. GWT and ExtJS is really stable and provide a really nice set of rich widets with great performance at the cost of a less good Seam integration.


      Which view technologie would you prefer for a new Seam based project?


      Thanks in advance!

        • 1. Re: Discussion about future of RIA (GWT vs JSF vs Flex)
          andhdo

          Web client development efforts are looking for RIA, but they need a server side support and the glue code according selected framework that enables you to loss a significant time in development.
          The integration with gwt is basic for now in seam, but we wish it could change in a nearest future, so, if you need some restriction time, I recommend you to use the traditional seam application stack (facelets,jsf,ejb3,pojo,jpa,...). You can optimize the time response for the user using apache as web server;
          But if you wish more good response times in the presentation tier, with a desktop-like pages, gwt or flex are good choice:
            a) you can integrate flex and seam with exadel flamingo (as flex does with data services with another backend technologies, but flamingo does with remoting)
            b) you can integrate gwt and seam with ... (the first approach is using remoting too, but see the jbpm's new console: it uses Rest).

          Offline versions means that the framework where you work, should need support for save the state in somewhere (disconnected clients) that is not possible for jsf at this time; maybe adobe air could support this.

          • 2. Re: Discussion about future of RIA (GWT vs JSF vs Flex)
            andhdo

            see this project too; seems an approach to use the ext-js components for faces: http://sharesource.org/project/lilya/