In this chapter, we are going to learn about the RichFaces project and how it can help us develop better Ajax web applications faster.
First, we'll go through a bit of the story of its birth and growth. Thereafter, we'll learn how it works (in general), which components are inside its framework, and what we can do with them. Finally, we'll explain some advanced techniques and start looking at the CDK (Component Development Kit) with a simple example.
RichFaces is a very useful open source framework that allows you to add Ajax capability to your JSF application (using the standard JSF components) without the need to write JavaScript code and manage JavaScript compatibility between browsers. It is integrated with the JSF lifecycle and other standard JSF features such as validation, conversion, and resource management.
Moreover, RichFaces offers the very powerful skinnability. This customizes the look and feel of your JSF applications. You can define different color schemes to create your custom skins or use the predefined ones. Also, you can manage the predefined CSS styles (or add your own ones) to change the appearance of UI library components in a simple and consistent way (you can even use XCSS to dynamically customize the CSS styles). The skinnability feature of RichFaces can apply skins to standard HTML elements such as input, select, textarea, fieldset, and so on.
RichFaces provides two sets of component libraries:
Core Ajax: The Core library contains components that are useful to "ajaxize" JSF pages and standard JSF components. It is very simple to define Ajax areas and to invoke Ajax requests in order to update those areas (we'll see how this is done very soon). Also, it provides a component to generate binary resources on the fly (for example, code-generated images, pdf files, csv files, and so on).
UI: The RichFaces UI library is a set of advanced JSF Ajax components used to add rich user interface features to your applications. The components support Ajax out of the box and perfectly integrate with the Core library. Also, they fully support skins and can be completely adapted according to the users' needs.
Another feature included in the RichFaces framework is the Component Development Kit (CDK) the set of tools used for UI library creation that can be used to make new components with built-in Ajax and skinnability support.
Other extras are the Facelets support, the possibility to create components from Java code (with documented API), the JavaScript API of components to interact with them from the client side (if you want to use JavaScript), and last but not least, the very strong community support.
As you can see, RichFaces has a lot of very powerful features that can help you with rich application development. In the following paragraphs, we'll do a short overview of the framework to start understanding all the possibilities you have.
