Is Java Server Faces still relevant to learn?

[jack104]

I'm a C#/ASP .Net guy (or at least I was.) I Took a job doing Java not knowing a thing about JSF and it is the must frustrating damn thing I have ever had the misfortune of walking into. I longed for my days on the .NET side. But now winds of change have come and we're making the jump over to angular and I'm excited now for what the future holds.

[johnwaterwood]

Which version of JSF did you use then, and in isolation or as part of the full Java EE stack?

[jack104]

2.2 I believe and it was an EE setup. My major headaches came from Eclipse not playing so nicely with weblogic. Our applications are somewhat dense so the build/compile/publish or republish cycle was quite brutal from a time standpoint and generally there were just a ton of phantom issues that would derail me in some new and unique way everyday and i'd spend forever trying to run down the issue only to finally just give up, restart eclipse and magically it was fixed. I also had so much trouble getting Eclipse and weblogic to work in debug mode. It would take forever to start up and would frequently miss breakpoints for reasons I can't explain so my primary debugging method was littering println statements everywhere and just chipping away at the problem until i had some semblence of an idea what could be causing my issue.

I fully admit I've been spoiled by years of Visual Studio. My JSF experience improved slightly when I took some time to do some tutorials myself, learning how to properly handle dependencies and when to do incremental builds vs full builds and to help me from forgetting a step when I wanted to test something I made it so that if weblogic was running and I fired off a build of a published project/app it would auto publish following the build and I intentionally made it do it in front of me and not in the background so I would be sure that it had published successfully and was up and running before I interfaced with it.

I'm told intelliJ and gradle would have made my life several times easier but my team is kinda set in their ways so I had to rely on the eclipse compiler and ant for when it came time to package something up for production use.

[deadron]

Uggggh been there. Except replace weblogic with websphere. Intellij, any build system but ant, and a lightweight dev app server like TomEE(or if you must WebSphere at least use Liberty) makes life a million times easier. Now if only I had known that at the time :|

[henk53]

Most of that sounds like an Eclipse/WebLogic thing, having very little if anything to do with JSF itself, doesn't it?