RichFaces The first milestone release of RichFaces 4.3 (4.3.0.M1) is now available. This is a significant release, with primary focus on improving the RichFaces Component Development Kit (CDK) - the tool we use to author our JSF components. A second goal of the release was to improve our “MyFaces”:http://myfaces.apache.org/ support, which we accomplished by fixing a number of issues, and identifying some further issues to be addressed in a subsequent 4.

JAX Conf 2012 RichFaces represented at the “2012 JAX conference”:http://jaxconf.com/2012/ in San Francisco this week. I presented three times on two JSF topics. The conference was overall a great success in my opinion - while not the most highly attended conference at which I’ve presented, those that attended were highly engaged and happy to have such direct access to the speakers. Indeed this was one of my preferred aspects to JAX conf.

I just returned from an excellent trip to the “Red Hat Summit/JBoss World”:http://www.redhat.com/summit/ in Boston. The event was fantastic, kicking off with a great “keynote”:http://www.redhat.com/summit/sessions/keynotes-sessions.html#12345 demoing “Drools”:http://www.jboss.org/drools/ in a Mobile scenario. Following the keynote were a number of great sessions, including one I presented on the topic of “Mobile RichFaces Applications”:http://www.redhat.com/summit/sessions/jboss.html#187. The session was well received, with some good discussion afterwards. In the session I motivated mobile web applications as a must-have in today’s market - users’ will want and expect a functional web application even if your native application is better.

For those of you still developing against RichFaces 3 (you should strongly consider “migrating to RichFaces 4”:https://community.jboss.org/wiki/RichFacesMigrationGuide33x-4xMigration!) we have deployed the “RichFaces 3 showcase”:http://showcase-rf3.richfaces.org (also referred to as the RichFaces 3 “demo”) to “OpenShift”:http://openshift.com, Red Hat’s PaaS offering. This is the same cloud environment we use to host the “RichFaces 4 showcase”:http://showcase.richfaces.org. div=. “!/images/blog/2012-06-06-richfaces3-showcase/rf3-showcase_400x.png!”:http://showcase-rf3.richfaces.org This deployment of the RichFaces 3 showcase not only ensures that this useful and valuable resource will continue to be available to you, the developer community, but also serves to demonstrate how you can take advantage of OpenShift and the latest JBoss AS 7 releases to host your Richfaces 3⁄4 applications!

RichFaces4.2.2.Final is available, the second RichFaces 4.2 micro release. This release was originally intended to focus on changes required to better align with the upcoming JBoss AS 7.1.2 release. However we had some community members step forward with some fixes, and those contributions ended up turning this release into a reasonable bug fix release! I would like to give a big shout out to Luca Nardelli, Adrian Gonzalez, and Jason Porter.

I’m happy to share the news that the RichFaces community has started an effort to wrap Twitter Bootstrap with the RichFaces CDK. If you haven’t yet heard, Twitter’s Bootstrap project is a set of HTML/CSS/js “widgets” that you can use for building a website/web application with an emphasis on a fluid layouts that adapt well to mobile devices. The RichFaces community effort centres around providing a set of first-class JSF components built using these Bootstrap widgets via the RichFaces CDK.

We’ve released RichFaces4.2.1.Final - the first micro release for the 4.2 release train. Since the CR1 release we’ve primarily addressed bugs with the Richfaces showcase and the RichFaces archetypes. CR1 itself focused on bug fixes and stability improvements throughout the framework. To try out this release, you can download the distribution directly, or for maven users, increment the RichFaces version in your pom.xml to 4.2.1.Final. For more information on setting up a RichFaces 4 application, refer to our getting started guide.

We’ve released RichFaces 4.2.1.CR1 - the first candidate release for the first 4.2 micro release. This release comes with initial support for rapid component development with the CDK and jRebel, and a new archetype demonstrating (among other things) a mobile RichFaces application,. For the most part however, this release focuses on bug-fixes and stability of the components and framework. To try out this release, you can download the distributiondirectly, or for maven users, increment the RichFaces version in your pom.

Richfaces 4.2.0.Final is now available for download! A quick follow on to our 4.1 release, Richfaces 4.2 delivers some “missing” components migrated from RichFaces 3, and provides usability and API improvements for resource loading optimizations and the push API. Documentation was a huge effort for this release; we are delivering an updated and complete VDL taglib doc, along with our more well established Developer Guide, and Components Reference. To try out this release, you can download the distribution directly, or for maven users, increment the RichFaces version in your pom.

I’m excited to announce the availability of RichFaces 4.2.0.CR1, our release candidate for RichFaces 4.2.0. Hot on the heels of the RichFaces 4.1 release, Richfaces 4.2 delivers some “missing” components migrated from RichFaces 3, and offers usability and API improvements for those looking to take advantage of our resource loading optimizations, and push API. Not to forget a significant number of bug fixes, and overall usability improvements. To try out this release, you can download the distribution directly, or for maven users, increment the RichFaces version in your pom.