On Jun 3, 2014, at 10:13 AM, Sergey Beryozkin <sberyozkin_at_talend.com> wrote:
> Hi Bill,
> On 03/06/14 14:26, Bill Burke wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 6/3/2014 9:09 AM, Sergey Beryozkin wrote:
>>> Are you misunderstanding the purpose of this possible effort by any
>>> chance ?
>>
>> That is highly possible! I just saw MVC, thought struts/jsf, and
>> freaked :)
>>
> Yes, I was also confused by Santiago referring to JSF, but I guess it will probably act as an optional EE mechanism for accepting the redirects coming from JAX-RS, this is how I've read Santiago clarifying it in the follow-up email.
JSF has a number of different parts, not all of which are applicable to an MVC framework. Some, such as the Facelets templating language, could be plugged into a JAX-RS based MVC framework --in the same way JSPs and other templating languages are used today in Jersey for example. At its core, this is just a convenient mechanism to provide better text/html representations for resources (Note that I'm not suggesting that this is the only part of JSF that would be relevant, it is just an obvious one).
As far as to why MVC? The world domination of "thick clients" (Angular, etc.) is a bit overblown. Yes, these technologies are great and will continue to evolve in the next few years. However, (i) historically, there has not been a single technology dominating the UI space and (ii) these paradigm shifts do not happen overnight.
We have not arrived to the decision of supporting MVC without a careful consideration of (i) community feedback and (ii) research data. MVC (and Spring MVC in particular) is the most popular Java UI technology by a good margin:
https://twitter.com/RebelLabs/status/471680296119971841/photo/1
And this is just an example, there are many other reports like that. Will the Angular's of the world continue to grow? Likely, but that does not make all existing server-based technologies irrelevant overnight.
Having said this, I understand some of the concerns that have been brought up (by Markus and others) in relation to possibly having a core JAX-RS spec separate from other related specs for technologies like MVC. We are currently evaluating this possibility.
-- Santiago