At the JBoss booth at JavaOne 2008, I spoke with RichFaces developer Alexander Smirnov (OGG, MP3.) Alexander is the founder of the Ajax4jsf project, which he started as a personal side effort. It grew out of his interest in JSF and was originally run as a stand alone, self-hosted project.
As he developed Ajax4jsf, Alexander began working with the MyFaces community, and started communicating more with the larger JSF community. He moved the project to SourceForge at the suggestion of RichFaces lead developer Sergey Smirnov (no relation.) Exadel began developing the RichFaces JSF components library and Alexander joined the project as a framework background developer.
At the time it moved to java.net, Ajax4jsf had grown more useful when integrated with the RichFaces component library. RichFaces, however, was still not open source. The combined projects came to the attention of JBoss, which contracted with Exadel to open source both projects as JBoss projects. These were recently combined into a single project under the RichFaces name, available through JBoss.org. (RichFaces is combined with the JBoss Tools Eclipse-based developer environment to make up the JBoss Developer Studio subscription offering.)
Current activity for the RichFaces project includes a focus on building RichFaces functionality within JBoss Portlet Bridge. JBoss Portlet Bridge implements JSR-301 to provide support for not only JSF running in a portal, but also Seam and RichFaces.
Joining forces with JBoss has brought significantly more usage, ten times or more in terms of downloads. In particular, Alexander says there is an obvious increase in forum questions and discussions. In terms of attracting contributors, there are currently very few code contributions from the community outside of Exadel and JBoss. Alexander and Sergey describe the development process for the RichFaces team as being structured with a well-oiled process, which creates a higher barrier of entry for people outside of the team. As early ways to bring in external contributors, there are current needs for testing, defining future requirements, and requesting features and enhancements.
For the future roadmap of RichFaces, Alexander says that the next step is toward semantic web technologies.
In a post “Alleviating client-side back-button issues with Ajax4JSF and RichFaces“, Jacob Orshalick addresses the challenge of AJAX implementations and caching behavior in Internet Explorer. This post follows on to Jacob’s article in Dev Fu, Continuing the Conversation — Understanding Seam Nested Conversations.
In his Seam conversation article, Jacob shows how using Seam allows you to maintain state in a web application even with users spawning multiple browser tabs and windows, back button usage, and data changes. While this works well on the server side, it doesn’t help when the web browser is caching and presenting old data on a back button use. In his post, Jacob presents a simple solution using JBoss Ajax4jsf (a part of JBoss RichFaces) that forces a refresh of the AJAX panels according to the current conversation state.
This article is edited and republished from the original source.
by Michael Juntao Yuan
JBoss Seam is a next generation web application framework developed by JBoss, a division of Red Hat. It leverages years of hard work and experience gathered from both the open source community and the Java EE community. The goal of Seam is to make web applications easier to develop, easier to test, better performing, and more scalable. Seam provides built-in support for important web application features that are rarely supported in other frameworks, such as isolated workspaces, business process integration, rules integration, AJAX, and others.
