ICEFaces 1.8 or 2.0?

Question

I am currently developing an internal application for our company with the following requirements.

• Rich GUI but only basic HTML like components will be used. So component list is not a deciding factor.

• Fuzzy requirements which might change frequently during the implementation stage, and tight turn around times are the norm. Thus am looking for a Drag-&-Drop design

  • The application will rarely be used (max once in a month) and the user base will not exceed 20.

  • Time is a critical factor and thus I do not want to spend time on configuring and troubleshooting the framework. I will go for a easy to integrate solution.

I did a brief research and decided on JSF with IceFaces. But am now confused about the version. If I go with 1.8, I get Drag-&-Drop designing (Netbeans 6.5) but I will be stuck with JSF 1.2

If I choose ICEFaces 2.0 I will have to manually design the UI which might take more time.

Any suggestions on which version to choose?

Answer 1

If you can, go with the newest stable version. There are a lot of reason to use JSF2.

You can have drag&drop with ICEfaces2 too, at least in Eclipse (see the wiki). IDE integration is available for NetBeans, the release note mentions a palette (I'm not familiar with NetBeans, but it may be what you're looking for).