Frameworks Comparision

Ajax support

JSF: No Ajax support, use ICEfaces and Ajax4JSF

Stripes: No libraries, supports streaming results

Struts 2: Dojo built-in, plugins for GWT, JSON

Spring MVC: No libraries, use DWR

Tapestry: Dojo built-in in 4.1


Bookmarking and URLs
JSF does a POST for everything - URLs not even considered

Struts 2 has namespaces - makes it easy

Spring MVC allows full URL control

Tapestry still has somewhat ugly URLs


Validation

JSF has ugly default messages, but easiest to configure

Spring MVC allows you to use Commons Validator - a mature solution

Struts 2 uses OGNL for powerful expressions - clientside only works when specifying rules on Actions

Tapestry has very robust validation - good messages without need to customize

Stripes and Wicket do validation in Java - no client-side


Testability

Spring and Struts 2 allow easy testing with mocks (e.g. EasyMock, jMock, Spring Mocks)

JSF page classes can be easily tested and actually look a lot like Struts 2 actions