RichFaces 4.1.0.Final Release Announcement

I’m thrilled to announce the release of RichFaces 4.1.0.Final. It’s been a long road from 4.0 to 4.1, with a significant train of milestone releases along the way. The journey was worth it though, with a significant 4.1 release building on top of the successful 4.0.0.Final release, providing: additional components migrated from the RichFaces 3 component set, altogether new components, and significant enhancements to the framework feature set.

To try out this release you can download the distribution directly, or for maven users increment the RichFaces version in your pom.xml to 4.1.0.Final. For more information on setting up a RichFaces 4 application, refer to our getting started guide.

Let’s dive in, and look at some of the details of what’s new in RichFaces 4.1!

New Components

We’ve delivered a number of new components in this release:

• rich:editor
• rich:pickList
• rich:orderingList
• rich:notify

Not only have we migrated forward more RichFaces 3.x components, but we’re also providing an altogether new component - the notify component - put together by Bernard Labno, a RichFaces community member.

Mobile Compatible Components
We’ve leveraged HTML 5 and CSS 3 to create a set of resources that make the existing RichFaces components mobile compatible. Check out the results yourself in our mobile showcase with your webkit-based mobile phone, (or checkout the mobile showcase directly with your desktop browser).

We’ve put together a comprehensive guide detailing how you can take advantage of this approach with your own applications, and deliver a modern mobile application today - leveraging your existing skillset and investments in both JSF and Richfaces.

Not all the components make sense in a mobile environment, and not all mobile browsers are equally capable. Be sure to also take a look at our mobile design document, outlining the choices and compromises we had to make.

Showcase
Along with this new mobile face, the Richfaces showcase has undergone a number of additional significant changes.

We’ve deployed the showcase to OpenShift, Red Hat’s PasS offering. The OpenShift Java EE 6 support provides a great platform to take your application all the way from development with Express (free!) to production with Flex (highly scalable!). For the RichFaces project, this gives us the chance to showcase our components in a Java EE environment, where our framework really shines!

We’ve also included samples for the new components listed above, as well as a rich:push component sample, keeping it straightforward to incorporate advanced RichFaces components in your application. Lastly, a number of bug fixes and simple improvements throughout the showcase have overall improved the user experience of the showcase itself.

Individual component improvements
I’d like to single out a few component enhancements from this release:

rich:push

Push has been de-coupled from JMS, allowing RichFaces users to take advantage of push technology in non-JMS (ie. servlet) environments.

A CDI API has been provided for firing push events - aligning the push component with the standardized Java EE programming model

rich:fileUpload

Some events that were missing from the 4.0 release have been added, including the onclear event

drag and drop

A bug with dynamically rendering of drag sources and drop targets has been resolved, improving drag/drop functionality in components like the rich:tree

rich:extendedDataTable

For those creating RichFaces skins, you’ll be happy to hear we replaced the cellpadding and cellspacing attributes of the extended datatable with CSS equivalents, allowing skins to override the values

For a complete listing of issues resolved, refer to the release notes of each of the milestone releases: 4.1.0.M1, 4.1.0.M2, 4.1.0.M3, 4.1.0.M4, 4.1.0.CR1, 4.1.0.CR2, 4.1.0.Final

Resource packaging
Another great feature with this release is the Resource packaging and minification. An absolute necessity when developing for mobile applications, this feature can provide performance improvements to your desktop applications as well by dramatically reducing the number of javascript and CSS files the browser client has to download. Read the docs to see how you can activate this for your applications.

For those looking for the RichFaces 3 LOAD_NONE capability, you can use this resource minification configuration to achieve the same results.

Source hosted on github
A significant achievement early in the 4.1 development process was the migration of our source code version control system from svn to git, specifically hosted on github.com. We noticed significant advantages to using git, both within our team, and in our collaboration with community members. Git’s ability to enable a sophisticated workflow, and encourage community contribution in the form of pull requests has made “bit management” a pleasurable task.

Other noteworthy items
It’ worth pointing out that RichFaces 4.1 ships with an updated jQuery release (v. 1.6.4). Keeping the jQuery release version up-to-date facilitates RichFaces inter-operability with other jQuery plugins.

RichFaces 4.1 works with a number of modern browsers, however it currently requires Internet explorer 9 to be run in compatibility mode, due to an upstream mojarra issue.

Documentation
Lastly, I’d like to remind everyone of the availability of the RichFaces documentation:

• Developer guide
• Component reference
• VDL tag library doc
• javadoc
• Showcase
• Wiki
• Browser compatibility matrix

These docs are a great resource detailing how to make use of the RichFaces framework in your application. They are however an ongoing effort, with some specific areas that need improvement. Specifically we need to flesh out the descriptions of the VDL tag library doc (note: the attribute listing is complete), and we need to vet the migration guide. This is a great way to get involved, should you want to contribute to the project!

Looking Forward
In a recent blog post, I laid out a strategy for the future of the RichFaces project, and extended an invitation to all who would like to have a say in future directions in our development forum. While RichFaces 4.1 undoubtedly provides some great fixes and features, we are excited about the future direction of the project, and what we can offer moving forward!

State of the RichFaces

With a RichFaces 4.1.0.Final release on the horizon, now is a good time to talk about the future of the project. Let me start by announcing that I will be taking over from Jay Balunas as lead of the RichFaces project. Jay has been a long-time shepherd of RichFaces from within JBoss, and has had a direct hand in making the project such a great success. Jay has been a terrific mentor and while he is stepping down as the project lead, he will continue to stay involved, sharing his insight and experience with the Richfaces team. He will just no longer get the final word ;)

Moving forward, I would like to see the project continue to focus on the key strengths that have made RichFaces such a great project to be involved with: innovation, open standards, community, and quality.

Innovation

RichFaces has long been the place to come for JSF innovation. Never content to simply provide a JSF component set, the RichFaces project (together with other JBoss projects) has always aimed to provide developers with a complete JSF framework for developing applications. Some of these innovations include:

• Pioneering JSF ajax support
• Client side validation
• Ajax Push component - leveraging websockets where available
• The CDK (Component Development Kit) - in RF 4 the CDK builds on top of the JSF 2 composite components feature
• Support for mobile browsers in our base component set
• Resource packaging and minification
• Advanced queuing
• Sophisticated tooling support (together with JBoss tools)

Open Standards

Richfaces has played a significant role in improving the JSF specification with contributions to JSF 2.0, particularly in the area of ajax integration. RichFaces also aims to improve the standards story by integrating JSF with other Java EE standards in some of the same innovations mentioned above:

• Client side validation brings Bean Validation into the client environment
• The push component couples JMS messaging with our JSF component set
• The push component also leverages CDI, providing building on the standardized Java EE programming model

Community
RichFaces is also very much a community oriented project. Both our development and planning efforts are done out in the open, with an open door to anyone who wants to help out. Some of the ways we actively work to facilitate community interaction include:

• A user forum with an incredible amount of traffic
• Weekly team meetings held openly in IRC
• A developer forum - where new ideas for the framework are worked out
• Active use of social media (twitter, Google+)
• Github hosting - facilitating community contributions

Quality
RichFaces is a very well tested project, with a dedicated QE team that continually writes new tests for the framework, and ensures that existing tests continue to pass in their automated runs. Look forward to some upcoming blog posts, where we will expand on our testing strategy, and speak to the industry leading role JBoss is taking with projects like Arquillian, JSFUnit, and how we build on that with RichFaces. This all comes together in a robust, enterprise-ready platform on which you can develop and deploy your applications.

Moving Forward
Moving forward we plan to keep up this pace of innovation with our 4.Next efforts. The existing component set is crucial to the project, and will continue to see new improvements and additions - but we need a new vehicle to deliver new components faster and more effectively. We would like to be able to better leverage the mountain of work done in other OSS projects in the javascript component space, and facilitate contributions from prospective contributors looking to implement their own “critical components”. To this end, we are proposing the addition of another component set in the RichFaces project.

This new component sub-project will leverage existing javascript code where possible, either directly, or by composing them into new components. Where use cases require, we will continue to develop new components, contributing back to upstream javascript projects wherever possible. This idea is currently at a proposal stage, with a proof-of-principle demonstrated my recent CDK blog series. Join us in the developer forums, as we work out the details of how to build this next-generation component set.

Thanks to all of you for your interest and contributions to the project, feel free to ping me in the forums, IRC (in #richfaces), twitter or anywhere for that matter should you want to discuss how you can contribute to the project, and help shape it into what you need it to be!

RichFaces 4.1.0.CR2 Release Announcement

We are announcing the release of RichFaces 4.1.0.CR2, a second release candidate for RichFaces 4.1. We had a couple of regressions that were introduced in the 4.1.0.CR1 release that we’ve addressed in the with this CR2 release. The expectation is that CR2 will be re-tagged and released as 4.1.0.Final, provided no blocking issues are found. Our QE team has done a great job running their test suite against this release, but I encourage as many community members as possible to download the CR2 release, and make sure it’s “up to snuff”!

To try out this release, you can download the distribution directly, or for maven users increment the RichFaces version in your pom.xml to 4.1.0.CR2. For more information on setting up a RichFaces 4 application, refer to our getting started guide.

Noteworthy changes
In addition to addressing the above regressions, our CR2 release has addressed a couple other noteworthy issues.

• showcase tweaks: improving the user experience on both desktop and mobile
• archetype improvements: including the addition of an option for creating a mobile project
• skins: warning messages had an unreadable color on a white background - (warningColor) [RF-11673]
• rich:inplaceInput: a fix for client side validation [RF-11633]
• rich:dataTable: a fix for a regression effecting component decoding [RF-11675]
• rich:calendar: a fix for a regression selecting dates in the popup [RF-11677]
• rich:pickList: a bug converting java arrays when used as backing beans [RF-11680]
• rich:fileUpload: A bug where the list of files in the event omitted the submitted files [RF-11744]
• rich:extendedDataTable: removed cellpadding/cellspacing from EDT, replaced with appropriate CSS [RF-11759]

Please test drive this second release candidate, and give us your feedback in either the forums or with our issue tracker. We’ll soon have a 4.1.0.Final release we all can be proud of, for the work we put into it as a community!