When Oracle Corp. bought Sun Microsystems Inc. and took Java under its wing, some thought that JavaServer Faces (JSF) would go the way of Latin and Sanskrit. Contrary to those predictions, however, Oracle’s focus on enterprise didn’t shove JSF into the background in favor of other technologies. Instead, Oracle continues to promote JSF as a way to handle front-end development.

Java developers and experts say JSF is alive and well, and poised to complement HTML5 and JavaScript – and, in some cases, replace Adobe Flash.

“In April 2011, we started work on the next major revision of the JSF specification, version 2.2,” says Ed Burns, consulting member of the Technical Staff at Oracle and the specification lead for JSF. Just last week, he said, Oracle "released a milestone 1 snapshot implementation of that specification, which is still very much in active development.”

“It's in a healthy state,” says Ray Ploski, director of Developer Programs and Strategy at Red Hat. Two implementations of JSF exist, Mojarra and MyFaces, and there is “a very competitive and rapidly moving component ecosystem surrounding it. The spec is under active development, bringing in the changes recommended by this large ecosystem it supports,” Ploski said.

Companies that are using Java Enterprise Edition often adopt JSF, says Kito Mann, principal consultant at Virtua, Inc. “It’s more popular for applications that have complex user interfaces,” he says, noting that JSF increasingly is used in insurance, government and financial applications.

“A lot of large corporations and government organizations are adopting JSF as a standard throughout the organization,” said Ted Goddard, chief software architect at ICEsoft Technologies, Inc. “That fits in with the sweet spot of what JSF is intended for – highly interactive enterprise applications,” he added.