JSF vs ASP.net

DuncanE asks: "We are looking at migrating an old legacy database application to a newer web based framework for the front end. For me the two obvious choices are ASP.net vs Java Server Faces. CodeGuru has side by side look at both, but does anyone have any real world comparisons? ASP.net appears to be MS only, which is a concern, depending on how mature mod_mono has become." Which framework would you prefer to use? Under what situations and conditions would you recommend the use of the other?

Comments

Re:neither?

[Anonymous Coward]

You lost all credibility when you suggested that Java has a bad security record and that Java performance for web applications is slow. Sun Java has an amazing security record and security is very easy to implement for even the most incompetent programmers. I find it incredibly amusing that you suggest that Java is slow and insecure and then you go ahead and recommend PHP... PHP/Ruby/Python are much much slower than Java and PHP has had an absolutely pathetic security track record. Are you a PHP developer? Only a PHP developer could possibly be this stupid.

Honestly, you make ridiculous claims about the most popular programming language in the world and then you go on to recommend an abomination like PHP? I'm not a huge Java fan, mainly because of the poor design of the standard library, however you clearly have no clue.

Re:It all depends on your existing skillset

[d-rock]

Just a comment on the portability issue. I completely agree that sometimes having to move an app between disparate systems may mean that someone didn't plan well, but there are also situations where it means you can leverage your assets. For instance, where I work I developed a small network monitoring/reporting application for our help desk to handle 200 or so sites. At the time I wrote it (3 years ago), we had a spare windows 2K server running on older hardware that was otherwise going to go unused, so we ran it on that. It ran great. Over the past 3 years we have increased the number of sites we monitor to close to 1000, and it wasn't running so well on the old PII server. However, an unrelated project freed up a Sun e450 4xCPU box and we moved the application there with literally zero changes and it runs great on that box (along with several other apps). The windows box has been repurposed as a backup DNS server now (running portable BIND, incidentally).

In this case the portability factor allowed us to fully utilize the hardware we had, instead of having to spend big bucks on a larger wintel server. I'm not saying Java has a monopoly on portability, there are lots of languages that make it trivial or fairly easy to move between platforms; however, if I had written this in C# or some other .Net language I'm not so sure the transfer would have gone as smoothly.

Derek

JSF hard to develop

[DeadSea]

I have a small project at work that I inherited that is written in JSF. It is a pain. Don't go there. I have problems with JSF:

1. Non-existant error reporting: If an exception is throw by the code backing it up, the error message on the front end will be something like "Exception: '{mycomponent.dosomething}'". Which really means that dosomething threw some other exception that it is hiding from you.
2. Everything is a post: JSF tries to apply MVC to the web, which is fundamentally broken IMO. The web is transactional, not event driven. To make it appear that everything has callbacks, all the links in the web app are done by making javascript submit a POST form for the page. Much harder to debug than any other web app that I've ever worked with. You can't just see the params on a GET url and expect links to work like every other link on the web

I've never used ASP though, so I can't really compare. Myself I prefer servlets that spit out XML and use XSLT to give HTML. The designers don't seem to like the XSLT much though.

Re:I haven't worked with both, but....

[Randolpho]

Sorry, I should have been more clear. Visual Studio 2005 now has Edit and Continue for .NET/C#. It has not had it up until it launched last November.

As for the IDE, I have indeed used both, and prefer Visual Studio. Don't get me wrong; Eclipse is a very good IDE. VS is just better, IMO. I've already detailed the real differences between them; the rest is look/feel, responsiveness, and general user experience. Eclipse is great, but VS is better.

It's like the difference between MS Office and OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org is damn good, especially for the price, but MS Office really is better. I find that the only people who ever argue otherwise tend to be closed-minded about anything MS-related.