Before we discovered Wicket, Tapestry was the framework "out there" that had the highest ratio of framework quality to community acceptance (on some naturally notional subjective scale :)

The idea to have pure HTML templating at all surely originated there, and from there was (indirectly) transmitted to RSF through JSF's Hans Bergsten, whose article "Improve JSF by dumping JSPs" and corresponding Chapter 15 in the Java Server Faces book was the ultimate ancestor of what become RSF[1].

Many frameworks have followed where Tapestry led, but all (save Wicket) have fallen victim to the central problem of mixing presentation with logic - despite parsing (with varying degrees of fudges) as "pure", these template files all contain references which resolve directly into the application's data model.

[MORE TO FOLLOW - copy from WhyRSF]

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[#1] A Hans Bergsten memorial comment is preserved at the head of ComponentProducer where it ended up by an extremely circuitous route in the refactoring that led from the JSFUtil "ClassViewHandler" that evolved from Bergsten's ancestral implementation.