Has JavaServer Faces reached beta?

Question

I know---please forgive my sarcasm. (I'm sure you've been at this point, too, in your programming career. I'll just vent a little.) I've only spent several days trying to create a simple page I could have coded in a couple of hours in any given language---Java, C++, 80x86 assembler---but not JavaServer Faces.
Has anyone created any real applications in JSF? It's practically unusable in the real world. I'm about to throw it all away for JSP and JSTL. Here's why:
* I can't pass parameters to bean methods in the expression language.
* dataTable can't create <th> except in a header facet, and a header facet can't access data being iterated.
* There's no way to specify different styles for different <th> elements in a dataTable.
* There's no way to specify a unique style (rather than the simple alternating styles) for a dataTable row.
* JSF beans aren't available to the JSTL expression language unless you go through ugly hacks (such as outputting a JSF bean method to a dummy JSTL variable) to make sure the JSF backing beans get instantiated.
* If any non-JSF stuff (including JSTL, HTML, verbatim character data, or whatever) is present in a JSF page, one has to tediously make sure that a special, seemingly-arbitrary hierarchy of subviews are in place---and even then it's not clear if you're following the spec or just managed to randomly find a combination that worked. Otherwise, all the information gets rendered out of order and out of hierarchy.
* Don't even think about getting JSTL iteration elements to work with any of this.
* commandLink still doesn't work in JSF 1.1_01.
I'd go on, but I need to go back to taking JSF out of the single page I've been working on for days.
Thanks for listening,
Garret

Answer 1

* dataTable can't create <th> except in a header
facet, and a header facet can't access data being
iterated.I've no idea why the heck you think a header facet
should be able to access data that's being iterated.
That makes no sense to me at all. A header is
explicltly and, to me at least, obviously not part
of per-row iteration!Read both parts of that comment together---what I'm really wanting is to be able to get a <th>, and the only way to do that is with a header facet. Here's an example off the top of my head:
<h1>Book Metadata</h1>
<table>
<tr><th>Author</th> <td>Jane Doe</td></tr>
</table>
Here the row header is from a list of arbitrary book metadata---we don't know ahead of time what metadata properties the book has. Maybe it has two authors. Maybe it has five creation dates.
It seems as though your frustrations mostly boil
down to:
(1) You hate <h:dataTable>, and find it too limiting.
Well, it's one of the first JSF element's I've tried (after commandLink, of course). Maybe all of the others work just fine and are powerful.
(2) You're trying to mix JSTL and JSF, and are
surprised this doesn't work.
For #2, it's a known and much-documented thing, so I
can't understand why you're surprised.
However documented it is, I'm surprised that not only does JSF not offer equivalent functionality as JSTL, it removes the ability to use JSTL.
Garret