I’m very excited to announce the availability of the final release of RichFaces 4.3 (4.3.0.Final). This release is minor in version increment only, as it packs quite a significant number of features and improvements. We’ve covered many of these features in blogs already, we’ll summarize them again here, and provide links to where you can find additional details.

div(alert alert-info). To try out this release: You can download the distribution directly, or for maven users, increment the RichFaces version in your pom.xml to 4.3.0.Final. For more information on setting up a RichFaces 4 application, refer to our getting started guide.

New components

We’ve delivered some new components with this release. These are components that were originally contributed by Bernard Labno via the RichFaces Sandbox. The new components we shipped are:

• <rich:focus> - used to manipulate the cursor focus on a page. The component is integrated with the JSF life-cycle to enable validation-aware focus capabilities. Blog Read the rich:focus component blog post for more details.

• <rich:placeholder> - pre-fills form inputs with text, similar to the HTML 5 placeholder attribute. Blog Learn more about it in the rich:placeholder component blog post.

New Features

Aside from the new components, a number of existing components have seen some significant feature additions. The <rich:extendedDataTable> for instance has added support for built-in sorting and filtering, and table-state saving. Blog We have a blog dedicated to the EDT improvements in RichFaces 4.3.

New with RichFaces 4.3 is the ability to define child toggle panels with the <a4j:repeat> tag. This offers developers additional flexibility when defining child toggle panels when <c:forEach> is insufficient. Blog Check out the Dynamic Panels with a4j:repeat blog for more details.

Testing

Automated testing has always been central to RichFaces. We have a great QE team behind the framework that works hard to help us deliver solid releases. But with RichFaces 4.3 we’ve taken our automated tests to the next level.

We’ve developed the Arquillian extensions Warp and Graphene to enable us to author real tests, running in real containers, with real browsers. Through the magic of Arquillian and Shrinkwrap, these tests are still fast both to author and to execute. Blog Read more about it in this deep dive to testing in RichFaces 4.3.

CDK improvements

Early on in our RichFaces 4.3 efforts we delivered a number of improvements to our Component Development Kit (CDK) which we used throughout this release to reduce our developer turnaround time in creating new components and features. In addition to enriching the CDK templating language, we introduced an incremental build feature in the CDK. This incremental build has proven to be so beneficial that is one of the primary drivers behind the RichFaces 5 build redesign.

Blog Refer back to this blog for further details on Incremental build with the RichFaces CDK

Bug fixes

With so many shiny new features to look at, it would be easy to overlook the number of bugs fixed in the release. In total 242 issues were addressed in this release. An epic effort for an epic release!

Path forward

As I just hinted, our steps forward are on the path to RichFaces 5. We’ve already started working on the new consolidated RichFaces 5 repository. Feel free to comment with where you’d like to see the project head in RichFaces 5 in the RichFaces developer forum thread.