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There are a lot of technical questions regarding JSF and jquery but this is a question about making a clean decision about these two widely used technologies. It's obvious that jquery and JSF 1.2 (Im always referring to JSF 1.2) can be used together, but is it wise to use them together?
Or it would be just better to use a rich jquery-based frontend with pure JSP? Moreover, when using jsf with jquery would it be also necessary to use pure jsp as well? I hope that the experienced developers out there can give some very strong arguments while answering this critical question. Im really worried that if I start a jsf/jquery web app I will end up writting some hybrid weird code of jsf/jsp/jquery that would be mostly a trouble rather than a clean java web app.

Thanks in advance.

ps: Im sorry if this seams to be not a pure programming question but I think it is more important to know the answer to this before finding all the small technical details.

nonouco
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2 Answers2

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jQuery can definitely be combinied with JSF. Even more, there exist component libraries which do that, such as RichFaces and PrimeFaces. Both have JSF 1.x targeted components with ajaxical capabilities and rich UI which are (partly) based on jQuery.

However, combining homebrewed jQuery functions in a JSF webapplication is indeed not exactly trivial. You have to take the server side state into account as well. E.g. when you show/hide a HTML element by pure jQuery, you have to reflect that as well in the JSF component tree on the server side to keep the both sides in sync. Otherwise the webapp may not behave as you'd expect.

When continuing with JSF, I'd strongly recommend to just head to an ajax based component library such as RichFaces, PrimeFaces or IceFaces. They have already taken all the nasty JSF-ajax integration details into account. Or when you really insist in homebrewing jQuery, then better head to a request based MVC framework instead of a component based MVC framework, such as Spring MVC. You only end up with more code.

See also:

Community
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BalusC
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  • I think PrimeFaces no longer support JSF1.x – Thang Pham May 20 '11 at 20:22
  • @Harry: PF 1.x is indeed no longer *maintained*, but as OP is restricted to the old JSF 1.2 you don't have much choice anyway. I would also warmly recommend to look at JSF 2.x immediately. It's a major improvement and ships with builtin ajax capabilities already. – BalusC May 20 '11 at 20:39
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The interesting complication you will find with the JSF/JQuery combo is if you make any structural modifications to the page you can run into difficulty, i.e. adding form elements based on some client side event. Because JSF is a component based framework, it expects the model returned from the page to equal the model sent to the page.

JSF 2.x has provided considerably improved support for ajax and whatnot, but it can still make for 'interesting' coding sessions when you are trying to do rich client side modification.

Another consideration is the naming of components in JSF, which makes it difficult to select an element by id. You can use the $= to get an endsWith match in jquery, so you can work around it, but it still makes things more interesting than plain JSP.

JSF does get you some rich component libraries (primefaces, etc.) that may allow you to skip jquery altogether and still get a rich client feel.

digitaljoel
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