Time for a JSF beginners forum?

[Brendan Healey]

Having only been working with JSF for a year now I could be considered to be harsh to suggest that
the employees of certain outsourcing companies are diluting the quality of the content here? Time
for a change? Just an idea... When I was just getting going this was quite a good place to get some
advice on simple and practical matters. Having gained more experience I have attempted (with
various degrees of success) to assist others since then, however there do seem to be a lot of hit
and run merchants about. A sign of the times perhaps or time to do something about it?

One of the most significant problems is that the forum software on the official glassfish webtier
enclave is now amongst the worst I've ever encountered, you can't search, there are problems
with presentation, duplicate posts etc... There needs to be somewhere where the experts can
have a sensible dialogue with those less experienced?

[Tim Holloway]

Brendan Healey wrote:Having only been working with JSF for a year now I could be considered to be harsh to suggest that
the employees of certain outsourcing companies are diluting the quality of the content here? Time
for a change? Just an idea... When I was just getting going this was quite a good place to get some
advice on simple and practical matters. Having gained more experience I have attempted (with
various degrees of success) to assist others since then, however there do seem to be a lot of hit
and run merchants about. A sign of the times perhaps or time to do something about it?

One of the most significant problems is that the forum software on the official glassfish webtier
enclave is now amongst the worst I've ever encountered, you can't search, there are problems
with presentation, duplicate posts etc... There needs to be somewhere where the experts can
have a sensible dialogue with those less experienced?

I don't know that I could put the entire blame on outsourcing companies. Sure, we get a lot a really appalling questions from people whose only real qualifications are that some VP said "IT doesn't matter! Why my little 10-year old Ralphie can write a program that moves a square across the screen and back. Let's just go with the lowest bidder.". Very frequently the people that get thrown into this would be totally incapable without an IDE to do their thinking from them. But at least the ones we hear from are trying. What really scares me are the ones who don't try to understand JSF at all.

However, a lot of the "dumb" questions also come from people who are moving into JSF from other frameworks such as Struts. Frequently, their problem is that they "know" how to do things, but they don't understand the fundamental difference that JSF offers. They're used to learning a lot of complicated APIs and class structures. They're used to being "in control".

JSF isn't like that. JSF was based on the KISS approach. POJOS, simple method calls and IoC wiring can do the vast majority of the work. People bull in using listeners, JSF class overrides, direct resource access and pushing parameters around on web pages. A lot of them don't really understand IoC. And that's bad, because Inversion of Control is a very important aspect of a lot of the new Java frameworks, not just JSF.

I don't really feel like we're drowning in stupid newbie questions here. We have probably more questions from the "know enough to be dangerous crowd", actually.