[culturedsystems]

It's also not unlike JSF in the Java world, which went out of fashion 10 or so years ago, and for good reason: relying on a framework to paper over the distinction between client and server side turned out to be much more complicated and fragile than a cleanly defined separation. I haven't seen any authors or users of these recently developed server-side-first frameworks discuss this prior art, but I'd be interested to see if they've come up with a way around what seemed like a fundamental problem in the approach.

[pjmlp]

As former JSF framework tech lead built on top of Richfaces, the major problem with JSF was its lifecycle model and the fact that Sun et al only defined the basic infrastructure and lead to a forest of frameworks that could hardly interoperate among themselves.

To the point that on my follow up project I ended up recomending for JSP with tag libraries instead, regardless of Sun advising them as deprecated and replaced by JSF.

WebForms never felt as complex as JSF.

I feel JSP like models with component libraries, or MVC are more closer approaches to the whole Web programming model.