Wikipedia entry for JSF: "According to the author of the book Core JSF, JSF offers a means for Java to compete with ASP.NET/Visual Studio in the area of Rapid

Wikipedia entry for JSF: "According to the author of the book Core JSF, JSF offers a means for Java to compete with ASP.NET/Visual Studio in the area of Rapid application development (RAD). The addition of the Sun Java Studio Creator IDE provides a RAD environment similar to Visual Studio 2005, potentially lowering development cost and other barriers to entry." So basically the world of J2EE pre-JSF is worse than ASP.NET and with JSF, J2EE is catching up with ASP.NET stack.