Richfaces 4.2.0.Final is now available for download! A quick follow on to our 4.1 release, Richfaces 4.2 delivers some “missing” components migrated from RichFaces 3, and provides usability and API improvements for resource loading optimizations and the push API. Documentation was a huge effort for this release; we are delivering an updated and complete VDL taglib doc, along with our more well established Developer Guide, and Components Reference.

To try out this release, you can download the distribution directly, or for maven users, increment the RichFaces version in your pom.xml to 4.2.0.Final. For more information on setting up a RichFaces 4 application, refer to our getting started guide.

What’s new in Richfaces 4.2

For details on what’s new in 4.2, have a look at the 4.2.0.CR1 release announcement, where we cover:

• New components (ported from RichFaces 3) ** rich:contextMenu ** rich:hotKey
• Push (a4j:push) API changes
• Resource Loading improvements
• Skinning changes
• A number of miscellaneous fixes.

Additionally, Lukas Fryc, has a few blogs out with further details on the developer impact of some of these features:

• 4 simple steps for RichFaces Push with 4.2
• Optimizing Resource Loading with RichFaces 4.2
• Re-routing JSF resource requests with RichFaces Resource Mapping

Looking Ahead

It’s now time to buckle down and focus on 4.³⁄₄.Future efforts. The themes we will be focusing on are narrowing down to:

• Continued improvement of the RF 4 core components ** Further feature migration from RichFaces 3 (as required) ** Bug fixes, performance enhancements
• A re-work of our testing infrastructure ** Bridge the gap between what we do to test our framework, and what devs do testing their applications

• A new set of components ** Improving our turnaround time, by leveraging existing javascript “widgets”

• CDK improvements ** Further simplifying the process for creating new components, while improving the turnaround time of component development

If you are interested in these efforts, and in the details behind them, chime in (or just follow along) to our RichFaces 4.³⁄₄.Next planning discussion.