blind dating: sexy, immature and ugly

Hi,

"The face and visual attributes are important. But what really matters is a backend." -
my friend  - suomi plumber once told me, adding round gesture.

"Try it several times, from different sides and then decide marry or not" -my another friend, armenian locksmith put it with wink.

I'm gratefully thankful to those simple people, because they formed my view of system architecture.

And believe me or not, trying to conclude what is a good and what is also pretty enough, I’ve got into the burden of blind dating with different client platforms. 

The situation here is exactly the same as you would expect: prettiest and sexiest are usually dumb. And those convenient - are usually ugly.

JSF is formally the ugliest and the oldest. It brings a burden of backend beans, like bastard children, you never know how to handle them properly. Mommy is always angry. But it gives you a strongest backend possible – pure java in the full strength. Some people would say: it’s a passé…But really, what convenient, proven and robust alternative could you propose???

JSF speaks all languages. JSF has several reference implementations and years of component development.
JSF separates Data and Business layers by those bastard backend beans  - so it’s a good design , huge, love it or not.

JSF allows you easy validations and provides event facilities.
And it’s quite easy to adapt. It is like JSP with larger boobs and brighter lipstick.

Nice old chick. Huuh?  No.

What I never got is how to combine  pure HTML components with pure JSF components properly on the page. It never works like you expect! This is the silliest thing I discovered in those ugly server faces. Lady is old, limping and grey and some sort of a mess is always present on the page.

Flex.
Sexiest, rich and productive? Sort of lady you can find everywhere, having 300-600$ (depends on version).  Everybody just fascinated!???  Really? Nope. Why?

I like their asynchronous move, it’s what GUI should do.
In my view it’s may be good for static data presentation and diagrams. Huge “maybe”. Browser is somehow overloaded by those things and you never know when it is going to explode.

In realm of communication they lack some better tooling to provide that mapping between flex components and server side objects.

They actually seriously employ SOAP, as a first option, actually, despite the fact that this is a heaviest protocol possible and there is no excuse to do that, except the case, when different and suddenly emerging clients should be attached to the foreign(that is almost never the case) server side.

You should go into the trouble to cover additional language(s) and into the idiosyncrasy of the mapping to handle the JESS, as a convenient alternative to SOAP.

You also may use regular HTTP request and treat everything like arrays, giving a damn time to every attribute of your object.

I hated all that from the first glance. You should be ready to provide some time to learn 1-2 languages and 1-2 protocols to get handle on it. And what I hate more than anything - It always takes time to arrive! You better prepare a sandwich, a beer, sit beside and relax. You may take a shower as well. The car with you lady will arrive in a minute, possibly, (that depends on connection speed and how much you are willing to pay for traffic). I would never suggest such a UI to some money making portal, clients would go crazy, and hosting would cost a fortune. 

JavaFx.
Young and with no proven experience yet. Be prepared to everyday screams, gestures and loud proclamations of divorce. You could expect all those problems the Flex lady has.

Even more. Immaturity is a huge factor. But there are 2 huge BUTs:

1)    Oracle drives a new initiative to endorse the JFX in the next OpenOffice version.  Oracle actually sees no meaning in them separated. They probably decided, all that SUN’s junk, all that crappy, no future and no money projects we better combine in one. (I wonder what a good reorganization it may cause in the crisis time!) You should expect a big move in JFX direction and some shrinking of staff…
2)    JFX is probably closer to java for historical  reasons. They are buddies. So I expect better integration in future than Flex provides now.

What I do not like is a crazy attempt to drive us into the NetBeans IDE, in Eclipse it is not working a bit as good as in NetBeans. So lady brings a full blown religion with her! That is quite intrusive, bad manners to my taste …Rich relatives and new religion it’s hard....

So, what have I decided ?
I probably would marry old JSF lady with all her problems and age. But I would leave a place, couple of windows in my schedule to the inexperienced, cheep, immature but promising JFX lady. Some graphs on page, some visual enhancements, some sex to regular stuff.

I never did a wickets, gwt and stuff like that. What do you think,is  it really worth to check?