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Java ServerFaces - to author

 
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Dear Hans,

When participating in an online discussion about a topic, i try to get as much information as possible about the topic. That in this case i am new to JSF does not really matter, what does matter is the JSF book. One of the sources in your case which i investigated is the amazon website.

whoa, there is a problem. When I read the couple of book reviews that are online I am not getting a warm feeling. One of the sources mentions a not very meaningfull way of j2ee integration. Another mentions the large section of appendices. And again another resource again mentions the j2ee/ejb integration and jsf.

My question then arises, what is your take on these elaborations ?

regards,
baz
 
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Originally posted by bas duijzings:
Dear Hans,

When participating in an online discussion about a topic, i try to get as much information as possible about the topic. That in this case i am new to JSF does not really matter, what does matter is the JSF book. One of the sources in your case which i investigated is the amazon website.

whoa, there is a problem. When I read the couple of book reviews that are online I am not getting a warm feeling. One of the sources mentions a not very meaningfull way of j2ee integration. Another mentions the large section of appendices. And again another resource again mentions the j2ee/ejb integration and jsf.

My question then arises, what is your take on these elaborations ?

regards,
baz




Great question! First, right now the Amazon.com rating looks terrible, because one of the rating that was a four star rating (the "The book of JSF") mysteriously changed to a one start rating a couple of week ago. If you read the text, you see that it's mostly positive, not what you would expect from a one star rating. I've tried to get this corrected, but no luck so far.

But, more importantly, the reviewers mention a lack of information about J2EE integration and that the appendices take up a lot of pages, as you said.

I agree that the balance between appendices and the rest of the book looks a bit unusual (327 content pages vs. 242 appendix pages). I like books that include all the reference material I need to use the technology, so I tend to do so for the books I write. The JSF book contains appendices that describe the JSF tag libraries, all JSF classes, the JSF Expression Language, the JSF configuration file and the standard web application configuration file, all in detail. There are lots of attributes for the JSF tag library actions and lots of classes, resulting in many pages for the appendices. For the content pages, I describe how JSF works and how to use it to develop a real application in detail, using a "real life" application as the main example. I only needed 327 pages for that.

Regarding J2EE integration comments, it's true that I don't say much about how to combine JSF with EJB and/or JDBC. That's because there's nothing JSF-specific about it; you use J2EE technologies with JSF in exactly the same way as you use them with any other Java technology. JSF is about the user interface, and the business logic is implemented as plain old Java classes, using whatever J2EE technologies you want. I try to keep my books focused on the technology I describe, and refer to other books that describe related technologies the reader may be interested in.

I should also say that there are only three reviews at Amazon.com at the moment, representing views of three persons. The six persons I used for the technical review of the book included both JSF expert group members and people new to JSF, and they had nothing but positive comments about the book. I hope that the reviews at Amazon.com will soon be better balanced, so if you have the book and like it, hint, hint ;-)
 
bas duijzings
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If you read the text, you see that it's mostly positive, not what you would expect from a one star rating.


Yeah, i agree. One of them was positive, and yes i was wondering why the one star was given.

Regarding J2EE integration comments, it's true that I don't say much about how to combine JSF with EJB and/or JDBC.


Maybe a matter of expert level of the reviewers.

and as for the hintz, I may actually do that once I have a copy ;-)

thanks for joining in and for your reply
 
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Is JSF part of J2EE?
 
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Hi Hans.

I was recently involved in an ASP.Net project and found it to be very interesting. Is JSF a push from the Java community to be more competitive with ASP.NET(WebForms)? Is JSF fully mature?


Thanks in advance.
[ June 02, 2004: Message edited by: Mcgill Smith ]
 
Hans Bergsten
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Originally posted by Mcgill Smith:
Hi Hans.

I was recently involved in an ASP.Net project and found it to be very interesting. Is JSF a push from the Java community to be more competitive with ASP.NET(WebForms)? Is JSF fully mature?


Thanks in advance.

[ June 02, 2004: Message edited by: Mcgill Smith ]



First, I admit that I know very little about ASP.NET, but sure, I think it's fair to say that JSF is the Java answer to ASP.NET.

There are many similarities, but also differences as far as I can tell. For instance, I don't think ASP.NET exposes an API to same extent as JSF does (pretty much all pieces of the JSF infrastructure can be replaced), an ASP.NET page must be backed by exactly one "code behind file" (or "backing bean"), while JSF doesn't have any such limitations, and, of course, JSF is a specification with potentially many competing implementations, while ASP.NET is a product from one company. Please correct me if I'm wrong about any of this.
 
bas duijzings
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integration/comparison with .net was one off the issues someone brought up when discussing the book on amazon. However that should be a wider issue and not one discussed in a jsf book (my opinion)
 
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