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NetBeans used to do that but with the deprecation of Woodstock (rather merging with ICEFaces) and with ICEFaces not supporting Visual Web Project it is difficult to choose NetBeans now [1].

Eclipse (the J2EE version) has a very basic version that provides drag and drop etc. of JSF controls.

So, I wanted to know which free IDEs (if any!) are there that provide good support for web development using JSF.

[1] http://www.icefaces.org/JForum/posts/list/13622.page

John Yeary
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Aayush Puri
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    I don't have an answer as I don't use any one, but I would recommend writing code above dragging'n'dropping code. This way you've full control over code and you don't need to face to completely opaque code whenever you run into bugs. – BalusC Nov 14 '09 at 14:53
  • Actually NetBeans editor (and so does Eclipse JEE) give the advantage of both. You can switch to the JSP code view and edit something manually if you want to. – Aayush Puri Nov 15 '09 at 11:13

4 Answers4

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You can have a look at the JBoss Tool plugin for Eclipse.

Romain Linsolas
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I'm really not a fan of it1 but Oracle JDeveloper has a JSF Visual Editor and is free to download (I wasn't aware of that).

1 Actually, I never used JDeveloper, only some poor customers did but it had many many flaws last time I checked it. Maybe Oracle did improve it since then.

Pascal Thivent
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  • Thanks! I was aware that Oracle has an IDE of their own but I didn't know that it was free. Will give it a try. – Aayush Puri Nov 15 '09 at 11:14
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You can still do Visual JSF development on NetBeans, but you will need to use NetBeans 6.7.1 which was the last supported version. Please see the answer on how to install it here: Netbeans VisualJSF (Woodstock) Design view not available in 6.7.1 which details how to install the Visual JSF (Woodstock) plugins. This is still a good choice for JSF 1.2 development with JSP.

I would recommend using JSF 2.0+ today for development. JSP based applications will still run on JSF 2.0, but JSP as a View Definition Language (VDL) is deprecated. The new VDL is Facelets which will allow you to edit it in any HTML editor.

Community
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John Yeary
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Visual design using drag 'n drop was an original design goal of JSF, but one that IMHO never has been correctly implemented.

In Visual Basic or Cocoa (Apple) this stuff just works, but in JSF it just doesn't. Even what are supposedly the best visual editors give you an experience that's much worse than even the early Visual Basic alpha releases from the early 90-ties.

JSF is great, but at this point it's more than 2 decades behind.

Mike Braun
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