Which IDEs Provide a Visual Design View for JSF using JSP?

Question

NetBeans used to do that but with the deprecation of Woodstock (rather merging with ICEFaces) and with ICEFaces not supporting Visual Web Project it is difficult to choose NetBeans now [1].

Eclipse (the J2EE version) has a very basic version that provides drag and drop etc. of JSF controls.

So, I wanted to know which free IDEs (if any!) are there that provide good support for web development using JSF.

[1] http://www.icefaces.org/JForum/posts/list/13622.page

Answer 1

Visual design using drag 'n drop was an original design goal of JSF, but one that IMHO never has been correctly implemented.

In Visual Basic or Cocoa (Apple) this stuff just works, but in JSF it just doesn't. Even what are supposedly the best visual editors give you an experience that's much worse than even the early Visual Basic alpha releases from the early 90-ties.

JSF is great, but at this point it's more than 2 decades behind.

Answer 2

You can still do Visual JSF development on NetBeans, but you will need to use NetBeans 6.7.1 which was the last supported version. Please see the answer on how to install it here: Netbeans VisualJSF (Woodstock) Design view not available in 6.7.1 which details how to install the Visual JSF (Woodstock) plugins. This is still a good choice for JSF 1.2 development with JSP.

I would recommend using JSF 2.0+ today for development. JSP based applications will still run on JSF 2.0, but JSP as a View Definition Language (VDL) is deprecated. The new VDL is Facelets which will allow you to edit it in any HTML editor.

Answer 3

I'm really not a fan of it¹ but Oracle JDeveloper has a JSF Visual Editor and is free to download (I wasn't aware of that).

_{¹ Actually, I never used JDeveloper, only some poor customers did but it had many many flaws last time I checked it. Maybe Oracle did improve it since then.}

Answer 4

You can have a look at the JBoss Tool plugin for Eclipse.