Under My Palapa

I saw some people were finding this blog by doing a search for ExtJs with JSF.

I previously searched and found that someone had wrapped up ExtJs into a JSF library, however it appeared to be a dead project.

A coworker and I instead decided to use Apache Shale to expose methods in a managed bean, to return the JSON data that ExtJs wanted. At the time, we were only using the ExtJs Tree component. We needed to use the ExtJs Tree instead of the one from RichFaces because of a certain requirement that could not be fulfilled with RichFaces.

Looking at the beginnings of a new webapp. I’m heavily leaning towards Grails+ExtJs, even though the ExtJs plugin has been discontinued because of the license change. Honestly, paying for developer licenses is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. For widgets, dojo seems to be a runner-up, however it just doesn’t feel as polished, and I find the experience somewhat lacking. I wish jquery had a more mature & official widget set, because it would be my first choice.

In my previous project, we used JSF 1.2 + RichFaces. While I feel that combination can produce good results, it didn’t feel very agile. On a new JSF project going forward, I would recommend Seam; however it is not worth the effort to retrofit a large project.

James Lorenzen has a post about how to roll your own ExtJs plugin for grails, which I will probably give a shot.

With JSF, we were pushing markup down to the browser using ajax polling & rerendering of components. However, I want to start using RESTful services along with Comet. This should get interesting…