JavaServer Faces provides a general framework for web applications. Google's GWT toolkit also provides structure for web applications on both the client and server tiers. A new article on TheServerSide highlighting the G4jsf project shows how the technologies can be complementary instead of competitive.
While both of these technologies are incredibly beneficial on their own, they also both complement each other extremely well. GWT is server-side-agnostic, while JSF's component-based architecture can easily accommodate any approach for rendering components. In this article, we will discuss (primarily by using a step-by-step example) a new integration library for facilitating the combination of these two complementary technologies.G4jsf is a spin off of the Ajax4jsf project which seeks to add Ajax functionality to JSF applications without writing Javascript. Leveraging the UI benefits of GWT along with the structured server framework of JSF may prove a valuable accelerator for web application developers.
