What next now that JSF and Spring are breaking up

Question

I'm working on a JSF/PrimeFaces web application running on tomcat which uses Spring to inject different services based on the deployment context. I was looking at migrating it to JSF 2.3 when I realized JSF 2.3 requires a CDI container yet Spring doesn't implement the full CDI specification and from what I've read, are not going to do so any time soon.

So my question is two folds:

1) how are people out there dealing with this? I've read there might be some workaround to bridge the CDI with Spring? But which bridging solution would you recommend? Is bridging a long term solution and does the bridging have any drawback (none working features for instance)?

2) if JSF is no longer an option, what web front-end technology would you use for a new Spring-based application? back to JSP? templating like thymeleaf? GWT or vaadin? Javascript technologies like reactJS or angular and working with two languages and data model?

Thanks for sharing

I tried that example but it doesn't explain how to install CDI in regular tomcat, so I started digging and that's actually how I came to realize the issue of JSF2.3 and Spring — willix, Nov 15 '18 at 07:52

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 14 '18 at 23:15

My organization used to be on JSF + Spring, but now we are moving toward Spring MVC + Thymeleaf. Using Angular or React with Spring MVC REST is not a bad option either, but Spring MVC + Thymeleaf will be a much more natural fit with much faster onboarding for the Java team.

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 15 '18 at 09:08

MyFaces 2.3.x should still work on Spring. However, i'm not sure if this will be possible with 3.x.

If you don't want to drop Spring, you can also add the CDI implementation "Apache OpenWebBeans", which is very very small (between 0,5mb and 1mb). There are "bridges" available on the web, how to inject Spring beans into CDI beans and vice versa.

What next now that JSF and Spring are breaking up

2 Answers2