RichFaces - Overview

RichFaces is an open source component library for JSF technology. It is developed and designed by JBoss. RichFaces provides reusable markups and AJAX capabilities to a JSF developer without having any prior knowledge of front end. RichFaces was developed over JSF 2, hence it follows the same life cycle of JSF. The in-built AJAX support and customizable look and feel features has enabled a new horizon for Enterprise Java application.

Advantages and Disadvantages

Following are a few advantages of using RichFaces.

AJAX support − RichFaces eliminates the old boilerplate AJAX, JavaScript codes to include markups in the webpages. Using RichFaces, a developer can include markups on-the-fly without having any prior knowledge of AJAX.

Component Development Kit (CDK) − As described earlier, the developer need not concentrate on the markups used in the application, all they need to include is RichFaces tags to use those functionalities. This automatic creation of markups will be done by a runtime environment called CDK.

Resource handling − RichFaces provides additional support to create different binary files such as image, excel, spreadsheet, etc.

Skinning − Skinning is a modern approach that has been introduced in JSF, which makes it very easy to control the look and feel of the application. Specially-centralized color management using different other customizable parameters make it very handy for a developer.

Following are a few disadvantages of using RichFaces.

Resource − This being a fairly new technology, getting good quality resource is a huge problem for rich face developer.

Complex − Transition through different phases and creation of dynamic markups is the entire responsibility of CDK. Understanding internal processing of CDK is a bit complex and confusing for a traditional front-end developer.