[smoyer]

JSF isn't the greatest, but it's improved a lot starting with version 2.0. I can indeed see a preview of what my page will look like (with templates applied) right in my IDE. The fact that you called it J2EE makes me think you're talking about the "old" Enterprise Java. I abandoned it for a while back then too - it was no fun to use!

[emsy]

JSF 2.0 improved a lot in comparison to JSF 1.x but is still crap compared to nearly any other Java web framework. I have worked a lot with JSF. At the end of a development cycle of a large app, we decided to start over and evaluated other frameworks. Nearly every problem we had with JSF (which manishsharan listed correctly) were non existent in the other frameworks. Not only that but they were mostly a breeze to work with. Once you start using JSF extensively you know immediately that it's a standardized platform becaue everything is a compromise. Then you hear that everything sucks less with Primefaces until you find out how inconsistent the API is and how unprofessional the code looks (this may have changed now but was definitely a problem 2 years ago).

I can sign manishsharan's approach: just use a REST server and a SPA framework. It makes frontend problems leaking in your backend much less likely to happen (another problem some developers had with JSF at my last job). You are forced to separate UI and backend which is a problem that's not exclusive to JSF. It's also easier to make features of your webapp available as an app where it makes sense.

[manishsharan]

I should have clarified: previewing a page in an IDE is not enough in my use case (banking): I would want to preview my page on different devices' browsers.

[henk53]

>I would want to preview my page on different devices' browsers.

What's stopping you?

With JSF you can write normal HTML that you can load on every device. See http://jdevelopment.nl/jsf-22/#1111 and for the older somewhat less capable version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facelets