Top 10 reasons i don't like JSF

Bruno Borges posted the "Top Ten Reasons I Don't Like JSF," offering these reasons along withe xplanations:

1. Extra step when defining a project's architecture
2. Fragmented Community
3. Fragmented Documentation
4. Component Incompatibility
5. Caveats on some scenarios because of different implementations
6. Designers and developers roles mixed
7. Does not improve usual web development process
8. Non-functional prototype
9. Performance
10. Web is fast, standards are slow

There are various ways to sincerely criticize a technique. True constructive criticism aims to make the tech and the overall development landscape a better place. You'll find this daily on the various JSF mailing lists. It comes in the form of bug reports, feature request and honest discussion.

But this 'criticism' uttered by the Wicket fans isn't criticism, it's blind hate and propaganda. How can criticism be valid when the facts are plain wrong or just too vaguely worded to show any insight of the criticizer?

How often do these hate lists contain nonsense like "there are too many incompatible JSF
implementations like Sun/Oracle JSF, RichFaces, MyFaces"?

What's up with that? How can you criticize JSF when you know so little about it that you just don't get the difference between a JSF implementation and a JSF component library? How serious would you take 'critic' that rants again there being too many Java implementations like the Sun/Oracle JDK, Commons-collections, Quartz and the IBM JDK. Seriously!?

And what about the nonsense about JSF being only about state? Or only being about POST? This is clearly not true. It's like saying Java can only handle unicode and no other character set. It's simply not true. Yet Wicket fans keep putting this in their hate lists. They don't seem to care about whether their items are true or valid, every item on the list is one, right?

In particular they typically like posting outdated information. JSF 1.0 had problems. Real problems. But how long ago has this been? How is that still relevant? Who still complains that Java is bad because it's a purely interpreted language? We have hot spot for ages now. Purely interpreted execution is so long behind us that it's completely not relevant anymore.

All this gives me too the strong feeling this 'criticism' is barely about real users being genuinely displeased by JSF, but about Wicket zealots being shocked by the fact their perfect framework is used so little in practice.

For the record, I really like JSF, but I don't think it's perfect. There still is a lot to improve, just see the long list of things being considered for JSF 2.1. But these hate lists... they are just WAY too over the top to be taken seriously if you ask me.