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.
With so many Java developers enjoying their Mac OS X machines, JBoss Developer Studio is now available for Mac OS X. Product Manager Bryan Che writes:
… now you can get all the benefits of fantastic certified tools and an integrated JBoss Enterprise Application Platform with native Mac support. Many JBoss developers use Macs, and we know that many in our community use Macs, so we’re excited to make this available. And, of course, if you’re a Windows or Linux user, JBoss Developer Studio has been available for those platforms as well.
Bryan also explains why this release only supports Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.x until the next update:
… due to an issue in Eclipse, we are only supporting JBoss Developer Studio on Mac OS Tiger 10.4.x and earlier right now. There is a workaround available for Leopard, but this isn’t a supported configuration. We’ll add formal Leopard support in our next update.
RichFaces 3.2.0.GA is out, requiring JSF 1.2 and JDK 5.0 or above. A demo of new components is available, and the announcement includes a list of the new components, including Combo Box, Progress Bar, File Upload, and Pick List. Enhancements include DataTable Sorting, DataTable Filter, and standard component skinning.
The candidate release 2 of the JBoss Portlet Container project is available. This completes the first milestone for JBoss Portal 2.7, as Project Lead Julien Viet details. Following this, the 2.7 work is focused on integrating the controller module of the JBoss Portlet Container and providing a “JSR 286 Portlet runtime meta data overview through the administration portlet.” The project’s main JIRA page has a roadmap for 2.7.
In reference to the Portlet CR2, Julien writes:
Since the candidate release 1 we added an administration portlet that can manage the life cycle of the deployed applications and containers.
We have also added a very useful event debugger that can help developers to understand the event flow distributed among the different portlets during the interactions an event phase.
Mark Proctor at JBoss World on video talking about how Drools/JBoss Rules fits in to the SOA infrastructure handling business logic. While covering a lot of basics and ground, Mark provides a vision of a fully integrated and tooled platform that includes authoring, service side management, deployment, and a runtime:
Download this video: [Ogg Theora]
(Updated to include more details about the JBoss Portal 2.7 status.)
Just completed a great session with Emmanuel Bernard on Hibernate Search. Emmanuel is engaging as a speaker, and his demonstrating adding Hibernate Search capabilities to a web store in 15, well, 17 minutes was fun and informative. We got good multimedia coverage of this one (finally!), results featured here in the near future.
Right now I’m sitting in Max Katz’s talk on Developing Rich Internet Applications with JBoss RichFaces. Similar to what I’ve seen many times in the last few days, Max is doing a live demonstration using JBoss Developer Studio (the subscription version of JBoss Tools), writing a building up an application using JSF and RichFaces. It’s great to see a roomful of attention on these tools that were open sourced by Exadel and Red Hat.
