Need suggestion to choose JSF

HI,

We are in the process of evaluating the different technologies to implement our application. Our application is like forums which will get the millions of users every day. For example, this stackoverflow.com handles such a heavy user base without any problem.

My question is whether JSF is suitable framework to develop such a application. We will be using components like RichFaces on top of JSF to design the front end. I have s开发者_JAVA技巧een few comments about jsf that it is slow compare to other technologies.

I am anticipating your suggestions and ideas for my work. I am Java developer and would prefer to select any of the Java framework. Please advise me.

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I would say JSF is indeed a very good choice. If you're building an application that serves "millions of users", then more often than not the back-end architecture is much more important than the frond-end web framework.

As a rule of thumb, only a small percentage of the time that processing a complete requests takes is spent in the web framework. The majority of time is always in the DB and in IO. Get that right and you're basically there.

The advantages of JSF are many. It's very easy to work with and it's very popular. This means there are many books, articles, blogs and fora out there to help you. Additionally, it's relatively easier to find extra employees who already know JSF than it is to find people having experience with one of the less used web frameworks.

The fact that JSF is so popular also means there are lots of component libraries and extensions available for it. This overall makes your life a lot easier. It's always faster to use some existing component than building it from scratch.

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If you are looking for a website like SO, then I'd suggest GWT. It is easy to work with, faster (relative to jsf), good ajax support, embeddable and doesn't have a steep learning curve especially when you are coming from an action based framework like struts etc.

Checkout its demo show case and also the real world implementations here.

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If you are building a forum-like application, why not use an existing solution such as the software on which stackoverflow.com is built-on?