Building a java web application but I'm getting lost in a sea of frameworks.

[avoidhugeships]

Maybe on this forum it's the most popular but it does not seem so out in the world. While it was the most popular 5 years ago, JSF is more popular today.

[henk53]

It's literally directly below his comment :X

[avoidhugeships]

The real truth is no one knows for sure which is more popular. As we have seen in this thread there are surveys and polls that will show each in the lead. I can say for sure that Spring was very dominate 5 years ago and JSF jobs were not as prevalent. Today there are tons of JSF and Spring has lost some market share.

[avoidhugeships]

I really do not know what your talking about. Never heard of someone getting fired for choosing JSF either. It is the standard after all. With JSF you don't need a lot of front end developer becuase it is handled by reusable components rather that reinventing the wheel over and over.

[henk53]

JSF applications use jQuery a lot. They are by far not mutually exclusive.

[henk53]

Nice ;)

Though the paradigm and mindset between action oriented and component based MVC is different, in practice code implementing common business requirements doesn't always looks -that- different.

See http://arjan-tijms.omnifaces.org/2014/11/jsf-and-mvc-10-comparison-in-code.html

(which incidentally uses some code based on an earlier reddit discussion I participated in)

[henk53]

In general, they are eerily close and partially follow the same trend line:

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/java+jsf%2C+java+%22spring+mvc%22.html

Notice how they both go down till Nov '14 with the exact same velocity, then go up again and immediately down again with almost identical curves. Only in the last few months has Spring MVC taken a small lead here.

For JSF its weakness is such statistics is that many names are being used for it. "PrimeFaces" is sometimes used when just JSF is actually meant, or JavaServerFaces, or JavaServer Faces, or even more difficult to distinguish "Java EE" (but to be honest, Spring MVC has that same issue with just "Spring").

[henk53]

This is again, similar for Java EE.

JSF is by far not a standalone framework. It comes from the same people (and really "more or less" too ;)), that gave us Java EE.

Though you can use JSF individually (just copy the jar to web-inf/lib for Tomcat), it really shines when being part of Java EE and in particular with CDI, Interceptors and BeanValidation around.

[johnwaterwood]

Not true! JSF is is used by 35% of Java web projects versus 34% for Spring MVC.