JSF vs. Spring

If you absolutely have to choose one over the other my recommendation is Spring. Here’s why:

• It feels like Spring makes developing Test-First easier. The strong leanings toward dependency injection make this feel much easier.
• As a web framework, Spring appears to have the advantage from a scalability perspective.
• JSF just doesn’t have the middle-tier support available in Spring.
• Couldn’t find any way to do deep linking in JSF. For some applications this could be a real “deal breaker”.
• Springs use of “Commons Validator” for client side validation.

Ideally, I would select to use Spring and JSF in coordination if given the choice, assuming that I could find a way to work around the scalability issues of JSF. Here’s why:

• UI creation with JSF is more robust.
• The combination of the two technologies allows for the robust UI layer in JSF to be supplemented by a robust middle-tier provided by Spring.
• JSF appears to be gaining a great deal of support in the industry due to the fact that it was specifically created as an industry standard.
• JSF has a significant set of tools and IDE integrations available to it to easy development.

Hopefully, this brief comparison has helped you in your search for information. If you are looking for more information on the comparison of Spring to JSF you should checkout: https://equinox.dev.java.net/framework-comparison/WebFrameworks.pdf written by Matt Raible.

Disclaimer: I have not developed an entire application using JSF.