Comments at DigitallyCreated Blog (for blogs tagged: "ASP.NET MVC")

Robert Whane commented on "ASP.NET MVC Compared to JSF"

Robert Whane — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 17:43:58 GMT

Hi, interesting to read your comparison. There are a few things not entirely correct, let me explain:

>All of this goes into the one XML file.

This is not true and never had been true. From the beginning one could use the javax.faces.CONFIG_FILES parameter to specify multiple different files. You could have one xml for your managed beans, one for your navigation rules etc.

In JSF 2.x the faces-config.xml files are largely redundant. In JSF 2.1 (current version) there isn't any kind of XML configuration file required if you are satisfied with the defaults (not even web.xml). See e.g. http://jdevelopment.nl/minimal-3tier-java-ee-app-xml-config/

Validators, managed beans, and a lot more are now recommended to be declared using a simple annotation (metadata) on the class in question. Navigation can make use of implicit rules, which means you don't define any rule but use the page (view) name directly.

>JSF is a POST->Redirect, GET->Response.

Well, there always has been the h:outputLink, and you could of course use the plain html a href. The downside of these were that you had to specify the full URL. In JSF 2.0 there's the h:link and h:button that support GET based navigation. There's also first-class support available to process GET based requests.

>No Page Templating Support

Also not entirely true. Facelets solves this and has been doing it for quite some time. Three years prior to writing your article, this one appeared: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-facelets/

It was a separate download back then, but there was very little reason not to use it. Nowadays in JSF 2.0 JSP has been completely deprecated and Facelets is the default templating language.

>In JSF, it is awkward and difficult to communicate data between pages.

For communication between requests to the same page, there is now the view scope. For communication between different pages there are various tools, like The Flash (inspired by RoR, like TempData), GET requests and because JSF can easily piggyback on CDI (new in Java EE 6), the conversation scope. Various extension projects (Seam 3, Apache CODI) allow you to very easily add additional scopes for communication between pages.

>JSF doesn't really support URL query string parameters (since every link is a POST)

As explained above, you could always use plain links or output links. The GET support in JSF 2.0 has first class support for query parameters and the redirect mechanism also allows one to use query parameters.

Please see the updated version of the page you linked wrt communication between beans: http://balusc.blogspot.com/2011/09/communication-in-jsf-20.html

>JSF doesn't come with any of this stuff [AJAX/JS]ready and out of the box and due to its awkward page navigation system, makes it difficult to incorporate one of the existing technologies into it.

Again not entirely true. Among others the a4j (ajax4jsf) library demonstrated very early on how AJAX could be used with JSF. This was actually quite easy. You just put the a4j:ajax tag around any existing non-ajax-aware component and it was ajaxified. This approach has been incorporated into the JSF standard in 2.0.

You could also always use javascript on your JSF views. There was no specific restriction that prevented this.

Hope this helped to clear up things a little ;)

voidlogic commented on "ASP.NET MVC Compared to JSF"

voidlogic — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 22:29:26 GMT

>>Faces-Config.xml

IDE's like Netbeans but a GUI front end on this. Also, as of JSF 2.0 a lot of this can be done with annotations.

>>No Page Templating Support

JSF has the <include that can be used to add your common headers, footers and navigation columns... If you are copy and pasting you are not using this directive right.

>>Awkward Communication Between Pages and Between Objects

This is just wrong. I have a very small facesLibrary class I wrote and use on every project that lets me access parameters and beans with nothing more than a getParam("Param Name");

>> Visual Studio

Its no Netbeans.... :(

Unknown (google) commented on "ASP.NET MVC Compared to JSF"

Unknown (google) — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 11:17:03 GMT

Hi,

Its been a very nice article comparing the 2 technologies based on logic and features.As JSF 2.0 is released now. Do you still believe asp.net mvc is better than jsf 2.0. If yes than pls. comment why?

Source Code commented on "Deep Inside ASP.NET MVC 2 Model Metadata and Validation"

Source Code — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 18:45:10 GMT

I have a question, When I apply a validation attribute (which is having associated validator to it) twice on a property, for eg I have number1 which should be lesser than number2 and number3. so I apply something like below.
[LessThan("Number2",ErrorMessage=)]
[LessThan("Number3",ErrorMessage=)]
public int Number1

problem here is when it evaluates Number1 < Number3 to true, then it is not checking for Number1 <Number2, it assumes that validation for the whole field is passed. How can we ensure, we go through each validation (attribute rule) and make sure the correct Validation error is returned.

Arnab commented on "Getting the Correct HTTP Status Codes out of ASP.NET Custom Error Pages"

Arnab — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 08:39:07 GMT

y, I was wrong, I don't need to do anything special.

Daniel Chambers commented on "Getting the Correct HTTP Status Codes out of ASP.NET Custom Error Pages"

Daniel Chambers — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 12:04:43 GMT

I'm not exactly sure what you're getting at Arnab, but no, you don't need to do anything special with your controllers.
The ErrorController obviously has a public default constructor so that it can be easily newed up in the error handling code, but you don't have to do that... you could just as easily ask a dependency injection container to give you a new instance of the ErrorController, or hard code something there.

Arnab commented on "Getting the Correct HTTP Status Codes out of ASP.NET Custom Error Pages"

Arnab — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 08:59:41 GMT

But this would mean that all controllers need to have a public initializer, am I rt?

controller.Execute(new RequestContext(new HttpContextWrapper(Context), routeData));

Daniel Chambers commented on "Deep Inside ASP.NET MVC 2 Model Metadata and Validation"

Daniel Chambers — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 15:42:59 GMT

Thanks for clearing that one up Brad. :)

Brad Wilson commented on "Deep Inside ASP.NET MVC 2 Model Metadata and Validation"

Brad Wilson — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 12:17:47 GMT

Regarding your peanut gallery comment:

Our validation system is designed to be very specific to MVC. The ControllerContext is present so that a validation library could be developed which used ambient information about the request in progress to make decisions about how validation will proceed. The fact that we don't currently use that information ourselves is irrelevant, as this is an extensibility point in the system that's designed to be consumed by others.

If you are limiting yourself to DataAnnotations attributes and you want to consume them yourself from the business layer, I would suggest you use the DataAnnotations APIs yourself. In particular, you are looking for the static Validator class in System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.dll in .NET 4.

Thanigainathan commented on "Deep Inside ASP.NET MVC 2 Model Metadata and Validation"

Thanigainathan — Sun, 23 May 2010 16:55:07 GMT

Hi,

Your article is really very good. But its really surprising why Microsoft doesn't provide any documents on inner workings of MVC framework. Is that because its maintained in Codeplex ?

Please write a book on MVC which will be helpful for us .

Thanks,
Thani

Troy Cox commented on "Deep Inside ASP.NET MVC 2 Model Metadata and Validation"

Troy Cox — Mon, 10 May 2010 00:17:37 GMT

Nice post.

@ERolnkcki, I don't, for one, like my business models ever making it to the UI. I use view models. My view models use the validation.

--by the way Readability fixes your site so I can read it.

E Rolnicki commented on "Deep Inside ASP.NET MVC 2 Model Metadata and Validation"

E Rolnicki — Thu, 06 May 2010 13:17:38 GMT

good post. since you are validating your model in the business layer (as you should), just override the default model binder's OnModelUpdated to remove the validation on binding.

Snoopy commented on "DigitallyCreated v4.0 Launched"

Snoopy — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 15:36:37 GMT

Very green indeed. :)
No really, job well done!!
Any employer would be lucky to have you.

Daniel Chambers commented on "DigitallyCreated v4.0 Launched"

Daniel Chambers — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:09:08 GMT

@Brent: Haha, being an Xbox fanboy is not something I can be accused of... I don't even own one; I'm a PC gamer through and through, a byproduct of the fact that I like FPSs and FPSs suck on consoles. Though, if I had to choose a console, it would be a 360! The Wii just feels pointless and stupid to me (or more accurately, I feel stupid using it; if I want to play tennis or bowl, I'll just go do that), and the PS3 is from Sony, who hold their customers in contempt.

@LuckySword: See whether DigitallyCreated Utilities (http://dcutilities.codeplex.com) has anything that can help you with those sites. Over the next few weeks I'm going to work on getting a public release of that out with real doco, so for now, look in the repo.

Brent commented on "DigitallyCreated v4.0 Launched"

Brent — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 13:17:54 GMT

Nice work.. Looks awesome even if the green make you look like an XBox fan..

Dwain Bunker commented on "DigitallyCreated v4.0 Launched"

Dwain Bunker — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 22:29:14 GMT

Awesome, dude. I'm going to re-write my blog too aswell as proxiteam.net. Going to take some lessons from your blog. :D Congratulations on going live :)