Ahh yes.
After learning about JSF2 in mid-October, I've been following very closely the changes and discussions around its new architecture, and how it can be "fixed." At the top of the wish list, among other contenders like "Fixing Navigation Rules," and even above "Simplified component development," is one very near to my heart: "Enhanced support for GET requests."
I began work on PrettyFaces before learning that JSF2 was in progress, but not before I had evaluated the other options available from the community. JBoss Seam had a UrlRewriting feature, but I found it cumbersome, requiring too much configuration, and the added burden of learning the entire Seam framework was too much for me. RestFaces was an alternative that I tried for a while, but several design choices made it difficult to incorporate in a non-invasive way, and I was left writing lines and lines of code in order to compensate for its (albeit few) shortcomings.
Shocked, disappointment struck when I was contacted by a PrettyFaces user, disheartened, who urged me to contact the JSF2 expert group because they were close to abandoning bookmarking support for the next release, a full five years after the last specification update. How could they be considering omitting such a critical feature? It would surely finish off whatever damage had been done by the first eight years of JSF's mis-managed life, and it would be dead forever. "Long live Struts," Apache would tout.
