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.

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.

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”!

Following on with another entry in my CDK series, this time we will look at at creating a pair of components to wrap the jQuery UI tabs plugin with the RichFaces CDK. It’ll take two components to accomplish this; one component to define the tab container, and another to define the tabs themselves. Let’s dive right in with a look at the Abstract component definitions. As always, if you are interested in following along in your IDE, you can get the code below on github.

I’m excited to announce the availability of RichFaces4.1.0.CR1, the first release candidate for RichFaces 4.1.0. Stability of the platform has been a strong focus for all the RichFaces 4.1.0 milestone releases, and has been even more so of a focus for our CR1 release. We really appreciate the community feedback we’ve received throughout the 4.1 development cycle, with each of the milestone releases. The bugs found and the suggestions provided from the community have really helped us nail down this release.

The RichFaces 4.1 Milestone 4 release is now available for download! With this M4 release we focused on stabilizing the features we introduced in the earlier 4.1 release-train milestones (M1, M2, M3). The release following M4 will be our 4.1 release candidate, so we want to make sure we achieve maximum stability with M4. Some of the key areas we touched are listed below. If your keen and want to get started right away, you can download the distribution directly, or for maven users, increment the RichFaces version in your pom.

The RichFaces 4.1 Milestone 3 release is now available for download. Further building on the new components and framework improvements introduced in the M1 and M2 releases, M3 brings it all together with an improved showcase - featuring a demonstration of the mobile compatibility of the RichFaces 4 component set. Along-side improvements to resource handling, and enhancements to the push component, we’ve fixed a number of bugs and issues, as voted by you - our user community!

Further incrementing the complexity over the input component we created previously, this time we will create a JSF calendar component. Being pragmatic OSS developers, we will leverage the existing javascript of the datepicker component from the jQuery UI project, and we’ll see how well the RichFaces CDK lends itself to mapping JSF component attributes into javascript configuration options. As always, if you are interested in following along in your IDE, you can get the code below on github.

Here’s a recipe I found useful for trouble-shooting a web-app over an SSL connection. The steps involved are to: Set the server name/IP on each of the testing machines (both Windows and Linux) Create a self-signed certificate for the server using the java-based keytool Export the certificate for installation as a CA in the clients Configure JBoss AS7 to use the certificate sotre All the above steps are sufficiently simple, but each required it’s own share of googling to get everything just right.

With our last component, we saw how we could output some simple text with a custom JSF component created with the RichFaces CDK. Let’s increment the complexity, and see how we can create a component that accepts input. Again, the goal here is to highlight how the important features fit together, and to leverage as much of the plumbing work as possible from the RichFaces CDK. If you are interested in following along in your IDE, you can get the code below on github.