The Eclipse Foundation announced the release of Mojarra 5.0.0-M1, an implementation of the Jakarta Faces 5 specification for Jakarta 12. This is the current version of JavaServer Faces, an MVC framework built as part of the Java enterprise suite.
Jakarta Faces 5 is still under development, so all this is new and shiny still; it's nearing completion, from the looks of it, so if there's interest, this is a fine time to kick the tires, so to speak.
JSF - or is it "JF" now? - is in an interesting spot - there's actually a lot of movement around it, with PrimeFaces, Mojarra itself, and other implementations still making releases. The technology isn't exactly pointless - it's a component system for the web, in Java, after all, and that's not a bad thing, per se - after all, React is similar in design itself, although React lives more explicitly in the client where JSF had models that could exist on either the server side or the client side. Yet the component libraries for JSF tend to be ... not invisible, exactly, but one doesn't think of the component libraries when JSF is mentioned.
And anecdotal searches tend to find JSF releases but not many JSF users. Yet the companies that produce the JSF libraries seem to be viable, so there's likely a substrate of JSF applications out there that just don't get talked about much.
What do you think - about Mojarra, about the JSF ecosystem itself? Have you tried it? Why or why not?
One of the things I'd like to see is a Jakarta Faces front end for Bytecode.news - but I don't think I'd be the one to write it well.