Max Katz

I’m very happy to announce that Practical RichFaces book (Apress) is now available. It’s a second edition (the first edition is here). This time around I wrote the book with Ilya Shaikovsky (Twitter, JBoss blog, blog) who provided tremendous amount of help and support. Ilya has been on the RichFaces development team since inception, knows the in and outs of the framework and has been RichFaces evangelist for many years.

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.  

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!” 

There are two people to whom I want to extend a very special thank you. They don’t always get a lot of recognition for their work, however, without their contributions, RichFaces wouldn’t be what it is today.

I want to extend a special thank you to Alexander Smirnov, the original creator of RichFaces for his technical review and for always being willing to answer any RichFaces questions. His “small personal” project in 2005 became the most popular JSF framework today.

I want to extend a very special thank you to Nick Belaevski for his technical review and, more importantly, for always being ready to help with any RichFaces questions and provide advice. Thank you for your tremendous contribution to RichFaces.

Table of Contents:

1. The Basics
2. Getting Started
3. a4j:* Tags, Features and Concepts
4. Getting Started with Rich Components
5. Rich Input and Select Components
6. Rich Panel and Output Components
7. Rich Data Iteration Components
8. Rich Menu Components
9. Rich Tree Components
10. Rich Drag-and-Drop Components
11. Rich Validation
12. Rich Components JavaScript API, Client Functions, and Using jQuery
13. Skins
14. RichFaces CDK: Building Custom Components