RichFaces comes from the Ajax4Jsf framework. It was created by Alexander Smirnov who joined Exadel in 2005 in order to continue the development. The idea was to put together the "cool" Ajax techniques with the new JavaServer Faces framework.

The first commercial version was released in March 2006 with the name of Exadel VCP. In the same year, it was split into two projects Ajax4Jsf (open source) and RichFaces (commercial).

Ajax4Jsf provided the Core Ajax framework and the Ajax components to "ajaxize" JSF components in a page (page-wide Ajax support). RichFaces was a commercial JSF Ajax components library.

In March 2007, Exadel and JBoss (a RedHat division) announced a partnership to open the source code of RichFaces, and the two projects were merged into a single open source project called just "RichFaces". It was a good move to solve the version compatibility issues that the two separate projects had.

Nowadays, the project is moving really fast with the help of the community of users involved with the RichFaces team who also decide what the future developments of the framework will be (such as which feature to develop further, which new component to make first, and so on).

For more information, visit the main web site at http://www.jboss.org/jbossrichfaces/), and the user forum at http://jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewforum&f=261.