JSF and Container Support

Question

Since JSF managed beans are not part of a bean container, who manage them for example like Spring beans. Also how managed bean achieve the dependency injection with out a bean container?

How JSF would be a better replacement for Spring with out a bean managed container and with other functions Spring provides?

Answer 1

JSF is basically an MVC framework focused in the view layer. When comparing it with Spring, it could be an equivalent to Spring MVC, but never to the whole Spring framework, which has much more functions.

For your question of who manages the dependency injection, the own JSF framework used to do that, for me, as an example, I'm using Tomcat which is just a servlet container, so I use JSF for that work (this means I can only inject other managed beans and not a Service or a DAO).

In other cases, for JavaEE servers as JBoss or Glassfish, the server itself has an embeded container (which acts like the Spring framework) so you could delegate the injection to its CDI implementation.

Finally you tell about JSF being an Spring replacement. As I've said before, this makes no sense. JSF is a part of JavaEE specification and it's being oriented to be used with CDI injections. Spring MVC, being part of the Spring framework, could be the best choice if you manage your application with Spring instead of with a JavaEE container, although you could also use JSF instead of it.

Anyway, remember there's always the discussion of going with Spring or JavaEE. The first one, being a non-standard, offers a faster support and improvement releasing. On the other hand, JavaEE follows the Java specification, with all the benefits of that.

See also:

• Spring 3.0 vs Java EE 6.0
• Using JSF as view technology of Spring MVC