Preferences

This is about my recent frustration with learning yet another web development framework. At work, I've been asked to become the expert in JBoss' Rich Faces, which seems to be an elaboration or extension of Java Server Faces. Somehow, these frameworks are supposed to make web application development easier. I suppose that is true for some value of "easy". So far I've had nothing but trouble trying to get the whole thing to work. I'm not sure if it is the configuration files, or the compilation of the web app files, or the use of the JSP tag libraries that has me so wound up the most. I feel like the effort and the difficulty of developing a web app using frameworks is just shuffling the complexity and difficulty into another place. There really does not seem to be less complexity and a higher level of abstraction. Some of the newer frameworks do approach the abstraction of traditional GUI frameworks, but go no further. I'm not really sure what the advantage is. I suspect that any breakthroughs in software design and development productivity (ability to do useful work) will only happen when we have a new theoretical insight into software development.