Reviews and Ratings
The woodstock project is the next generation in components that make up the Netbeans Visual Web Pack (VWP) for rapid visual JSF development. These components are used extensively in Project Glassfish for the administrative interfaces. The components are also used on the Netbeans plugin site.
The project needs to have better documentation, but I have not encountered too many OSS projects that do not. The components have a polished professional look and feel. You can use them as shown in the examples on the project website without using Netbeans. However, I must note that they were designed with visual tools in mind. It would be almost senseless not to take advantage of what Netbeans has to offer to create visually appealing pages rapidly.
You can pay a lot of money to use proprietary JSF components, or use the best freely available components from project woodstock