Ars Subtilior

Page URLs in JSF Applications revisited

Posted by Dominik Mon, 08 Jan 2007 17:55:00 GMT

Since I have to work with JSF (the customer wants it badly) I spend some time digging for ways to make the URLs of JSF Pages less annoying. I’ve found valuable information from Gavin King via http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=38601 on how to use GET for JSF. I even went as far as to try my hands on something similar to rails’ routes. It works alright so far, but I still find it strange that there is now easy Out-Of-The-Box way to do GET requests in JSF. Have I simply missed something? I wouldn’t want to miss the value binding and some of the JSF components make writing Java webapps a better experience. All the declarative parts are fun to use. But it’s way too much xml. I’d rather specify which view to show after an action somewhere near the action, if possible in Java code, and not in some xml file. Right now I’ve got the feeling that the creation of a JSF webapp with URLs that are at least bookmarkable forces me to work my way around JSF’s core, and that seems like a stupid thing to do, when I use a framework.

Or maybe simply I shouldn’t have read this here.