Could you please compare JSF and jSeamless

[Mindgamer]

As stated in the heading. I have a little experience with JSF and many of the things that jSeamless boasts are also listed as features for JSF. Therefore it would be wonderful if you could point out the obvious advantages of jSeamless...

I tried searching for this information on the forum but some-why searching for "JSF" returns 0 replies, although the character sequence IS used in some posts I have bumped into by accident.

- Write code once run in several places - I think that is also one of the selling points of JSF - the tag libraries can have different renderers so it is possible to write code once and run it on different platforms by just changing the renderer? I have not done this myself - all my JSF experience is just regular html web applications.
- Modularity and creating custom components - basically describes the very essence of JSF
- Themes and styling - also in JSF.

Now, I agree that some of the points listed in the features list do not apply to JSF probably (and there is zero chance of getting JSF to run in OpenGL), but to me the ones I listed stood out as very prominent among them.. but also exist in JSF. But JSF already has a very significant community with advanced tag libraries available etc. Now I know JSF has problems in some parts and I hate using it in some cases, so I am not a strong advocate of that framework.

However it would be nice if you could compare jSeamless to JSF in connection with the points I mentioned.

[darkfrog]

Well, the biggest problem with JSF is that it's primarily focused towards web-based rendering, though there have been some projects that do more than that.  Also, it is focused towards tag-based markup, and although the underlying functionality can be replicated programmatically, it is less intuitive.  Implementations like ICE Faces do a good job of handling synchronization between client and server, but they do a poor job of removing the complexities of styling, scripting, etc. that makes life developing UIs for the web complex.  That being said, the reference implementation of jSeamless 2.0 is being developed using JSF (you can see the current work in the repository under framework/branches/2.0 and implementations/jsf/trunk) focused towards ICE Faces.

There are a lot of similarities between jSeamless and JSF in the latest version of JSF spec, but still they focus way too much towards the web and also do a poor job of abstracting a lot of the functionality to the extent you still end up writing a lot of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS to make it all work and look right.  jSeamless focuses towards letting developers write code in Java and Java alone.