Icesfaces vs Myfaces vs Primefaces

Question

I am starting out a new project that involves the use of JSF 2.0. From my initial reading, the Mojarra and Apache Implementation of the project covers the basic components that you will need.

But I know that user's would seek gui with better presentation such as panel tab, accordion, slider etc... Currently, there are other implementation that I am seeing, the Primefaces, RichFaces and Icefaces.

But I cant find a good article that discusses which among the three are the best.

I have used Spring MVC before but I use JqueryUI for those widget. Now that I am into component based framework, I would like to use the best JSF Implementation.

I would like to know metrics such as performance/interoperability/ease of use/support.

Sorry if my question might be vague but I would like to hear comments before I select my JSF Vendor Implementation.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I happily use Primefaces as it is by far the most rich set of open source JSF2 controls out there, but they can be infuriatingly buggy at times. It is best to operate under the assumption that component X will not work correctly in a dialog without heavy tinkering.

I would avoid Primefaces if you operate in a development environment with strict UI design requirements as getting everything exactly the way you would like it to look and operate may not be a possibility.

Further I would avoid Primefaces if you are not comfortable with JSF, HTML, JQuery, JavaScript and CSS as you will need a good bit of JQuery trickery to work around the bugs that crop up.

But on that note, I haven't run into a problem yet that a couple lines of custom Javascript haven't fixed for me, and I have one of the most feature rich applications I have ever wrote in the shortest amount of time.

Answer 2

The speed of development is very fast in this area, and any article gets outdated quickly. I used Primefaces for a new project almost a year ago, because at that time it was the only one that was fully compatible with JSF 2 (both Icefacves and Richfaces have had JSF 2 compatible releases in the meantime).

Primefaces has a lot of powerful components that automatically use AJAX, and even more were added in version 3. Unfortunately this focus on new features led to a lot of bugs, but the developers said they would focus on bugfixing after release 3; I can't say anything about the current status since I left the project after 3 months.