Project Stage and Openness

One nice thing about JSF 2.0 is that they have taken good ideas from elsewhere, such as the “project stage” concept from Rails. If you set the project stage to ”development”, you get detailed error and warning messages. If you set it to “production”, you get more aggressive caching. Better diagnostics or better performance? The choice is yours, and that is good. There has been a bit of confusion about the default setting of the project stage. In the expert group's mailing list (which is open but sadly not yet archived—don't get me going...), I argued that the default should be “development”. After all, I am a developer :-) Seriously, one of the legitimate criticisms of JSF has been that it had a bad out-of-box experience. Make one wrong move, and you get the stack trace from hell. If the default for the project stage is development, you get a nice web page with useful diagnostics (and can still look at the stack trace if you need it). It turns out that several members of the expert group thought that this was the agreed-upon default, but the spec says otherwise. Hopefully this can be fixed in a spec update. It turns out that Ed Burns, the expert group lead, had fought a tireless fight to get other Java EE expert groups interested in supporting this concept. Yours truly couldn't have agreed more: CH> Absolutely. This is something that I have requested for years....

Date: January, 13 2010
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/cayhorstmann/archive/2010/01/13/project-stage-and-openness

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