The Richfaces 4.1 milestone releases are trucking along. With M1, we had a focus on changes surrounding project infrastructure, and the introduction of some new components. Now with M2 we see updates to the core, and a stabilization of both the new components and the framework as a whole. jQuery Upgrade We built the RichFaces 4 components using jQuery for DOM manipulation. Given the degree to which the we rely on jQuery, upgrading it is a “big deal”.

This is the first technical post of my CDK series. Starting real simple, we’ll create a component that produces a hello world output. “Why start with a hello world? Isn’t that a little cliche?”. Well indeed it is, but it is by far the best way to point out the fundamental pieces of the CDK, and how they together. We’ll build a strong foundation in our understanding of the CDK, on which we can build more interesting components in future posts.

This week’s Seam 3 Community hack night is centered around Seam Faces. This is a great chance to mingle with some CDI/JSF developers on IRC, and get your fingerprint into the Seam Faces DNA! Whether you have your own itch you want to scratch, a long-standing bug you want to see resolved, or implement a new feature altogether, we’ve got plenty of low hanging fruit ripe for the picking! In preparation for the hack-a-thon, I’ve given the Seam Faces JIRA issues a once-over.

A new blog series Having recently dived head first into the RichFaces 4 Component development Kit (CDK), I thought it would be useful to share the knowledge and experience I’ve gained. Over the next few weeks, I am going to put out a series of blog posts giving some examples of how to use the RichFaces CDK. Hopefully by the end of this series, we will have written some interesting components and left you with the urge to write your own JSF components using the CDK!

The RichFaces team is proud to announce the first milestone release of RichFaces 4.1. This release includes some significant contributions from community members, adding to and building on top of the efforts of the RichFaces core developer team! You can find this development release on the project’s download page and check out our “getting started” resources. First Milestone for 4.1 The 4.1.0 Milestone1 release includes several highly anticipated features and improvements in RichFaces 4.

(cross posted from :http://community.jboss.org/people/bleathem/blog/2011/06/20/seam-faces-302final-released) Great news, Seam Faces 3.0.2.Final has been released! It is available for download via the JBoss Nexus repository. Primarily a bug fix release, Seam Faces 3.0.2.Final resolves some compatibility issues with MyFaces, thanks to contributions from Christian Kaltepoth. Additionally, José Freitas has contributed some fixes to issues with the UIInputContainer. A full list of the bugs fixed is available here. I’m very excited about the community involvement in this release, and with more community members coming forward with features they’d like to see implemented/improved.

It’s been a while since my last post, as I’ve gone through a significant career change. I am now working for Red Hat, as a core developer on the RichFaces project. I am also representing Red hat on the JSR-344: JSF 2.2 Expert Group, and will continue in my role as Seam Faces module lead. As such, I’ll be presenting at JAXConf/JSF Summit on the topic of Seam Faces. I really like this presentation, as I not only go into the features provided by Seam Faces, but I show how some of those features are implemented taking advantage of the platform extension points built into CDI and JSF.

This is a blog entry I wrote for in.relation.to. I’m including it here to keep a personal record of the post. In this entry for the Seam Module Spotlight series, we will take a close look at the “view configuration” feature of Seam Faces. Seam Faces aims to provide JSF developers with a truly worthy framework for web development by ironing out some of JSF’s pain points, integrating tightly with CDI, and offering out of the box integration with the other Seam Modules and third party libraries.

If you haven’t yet heard about it, JBoss Forge is a fantastic new tool from JBoss for rapid application development of standards based applications. Forge allows a developer to quickly set up the scaffolding for an application, and quickly get to the matter of solving domain problems. What makes Forge particularly interesting, from my perspective, is the way it was built with plugins in mind as a defining way in which the platform is meant to be extended.

In Seam Faces we’ve provided JSF developers with a mechanism to centrally configure various aspects of their JSF views. Concerns like transaction control and view security are currently supported, and support for URL rewriting, XSRF attack prevention, and JSF navigation is in the planning stage. The end-goal is to support view configuration via multiple sources (including some support for <f:metadata> child tags). For now we provide type-safe configuration using annotations on enums.