In this chapter, we are going to start developing our rich web application!
We will explain all of the steps to build an empty project from scratch (using seam-gen), which supports all the technologies that we need in order to develop a "real" JSF application with Ajax support.
The aim of this book is not to be just a description of a technology, but we also want the reader to learn about the RichFaces framework while developing a real application, so that can be ready to develop an application of their own.
The application we have chosen is an Advanced Contact Manager with a lot of "rich" features that we will see in the next section.
After creating the project, we will start looking at and understanding the basic pages generated and the login box while doing some editing on them.
The example we developed in Chapter 3, First Steps was basic. Now, in fact, we are going to develop a fully-featured advanced application for contact management.
During the development of every feature of the web application, we are going to use the RichFaces Ajax framework as much as possible. We will also use the rich components that it makes available to us.
The next image shows a simple mockup of the application we want to develop:
Here is the description of the main features of the Advanced Contact Manager application.
Every contact can be put into one or more groups for better organization of your data. The contact group list appears inside a colored list with a tool tip showing the group description.
The user will be able to associate files (for example CV) and "rich text" notes to contacts. The file upload will allow the user to select more than one file at a time and add a description for each file using a wizard modal panel.