The view layer comes of age — JavaServer Faces vs. Tapestry

Web development, and more specifically the view layer at the top, has come a long way 
 from the spaghetti-code applications of the late 1990s, through MVC to the current hit, event-driven components. With a little exaggeration, we can say that ASP.NET helped Java out of its “dark ages” in its own way by inspiring the creation of a standard in JSF. On the other hand, open-source alternatives existed even in the dark ages, and of course afterward too. One is the Tapestry framework.

Phil Zoio fits a thorough comparison of JSF and Tapestry into fifteen points, including page development, the Java programming model, event handling, and component state management, in
 JavaServer Faces vs Tapestry — A Head-to-Head Comparison (TSS discussion). Event-driven components are exactly the direction complex web applications should take. What’s the next step? Personally, I think it could be tight integration with the RIA concept.

Simply put, one component talks to another. On one side you have client components inside the browser, on the other event-driven components on the server. For a rich internet application built on AJAX, the communication would be in XML. On a different note, the discussion around Phil Zoio’s article led me to a post that caught my eye: _viewstate is evil, or why JSF is better than ASP.NET, but that’s a topic for another debate.