Perhaps its just me, but tag libraries disturb me. Personally I prefer Velocity for the view and then some other means for the controller (in my case, JPublish)...

Well I like Velocity too, used it in one of my code generation projects.

My main beef against the tag libraries is that its so cumbersome. Its like it hasn't been designed to work well with each other, there's something incomplete about them. The EL does tend to add come consistency. Also, have you ever tried debugging throug the tag libraries, god forbid that you have to walk through a complex if-then-else control structure!

JSF however is interesting, well for starters the JSP compiler seems to be hacked. What I do notice though, is that the structure of the tags can be introspected. I don't know if you can do this with regular JSP.

My gutt tells me that there's just something plain wrong about the entire approach. Maybe, the XMLC guys have been right all along. That is be able to introspect into the structure of the page and then do your stuff. Apparently, its the same approach of Tapestry.

So, maybe Velocity isn't the right way to go. That is a simpler syntax for jsp isn't architecturally the right way. Maybe the right way is... DVSL Coupled with a page compiler like XMLC. (What does Barracuda do?)