Judging from the job advertisements in employment web sites, there are currently
two popular techniques for developing web applications.
• The “rapid development” style, using a visual development environment
tied to a proprietary back end. A typical example is Microsoft ASP.NET.
• The “hard-core coding” style, writing lots of code to support a high-performance
back end. A typical example is the Java 2 Enterprise Edition
(J2EE).
As we write this book, development teams face a difficult choice. J2EE is an
attractive platform. It is highly scalable. It is portable to multiple platforms. It is
supported by many vendors. On the other hand, ASP.NET makes it easy to create
attractive user interfaces without tedious programming. Of course, programmers
want both: a high-performance back end and easy user-interface
programming.
The promise of JavaServer Faces is to bring rapid user-interface development
to server-side Java.