Introduction

We have been involved with JSF and RichFaces for many years now, including teaching JSF and RichFaces courses for many years. From our experience, we have come to realize that many developers are using RichFaces and JSF without understanding the full potential of the technology. Without this understanding, developers can’t fully utilize the framework.

Of course, after a bit of trial and error, almost everyone gets their application to work in some form. However, developers often don’t understand why their particular application works. And, more importantly, developers get frustrated and grow to dislike the technology. That’s an important reason we wrote this second edition of Practical RichFaces—to raise the level of understanding in the developer community so this frustration can be avoided and so that RichFaces and JSF can be appreciated for the great technologies they are.

This book is entirely based on the new and improved JSF 2 and covers the new and greatly improved RichFaces 4. We cover all the most important concepts, features, tags, and components available in RichFaces that you need to know—all in one place. While the book doesn’t try to cover every single attribute for every single component, that’s not really necessary. However, with the solid understanding of core concepts, features, and tags that you will get from this book, we guarantee you will be able to use any RichFaces component.

Who Should Read This Book

The book is for anyone with a basic knowledge of JSF who wants to learn how to build Ajax-based applications with RichFaces. If you are completely new to JSF, we recommend picking up a book on JSF 2. Even if you have been using RichFaces 4 (or RichFaces 3), this book will fill in many of the gaps. We are sure you will say at least once in the course of reading this book, “I didn’t know that was possible with RichFaces!” or “I didn’t know I could do that!”