Panel is one of the section, among 5 sections in the page. Change in one section determines data to be shown in all other sections. These 5 sections
have a header and they follow a consistent style in look and feel.
From the rich faces developer's guide I observed that <rich:panel> is displaying header in a bar and it defines border around the body which goes inside the <rich:panel>. This is eaxctly what I am doing currently but with the help of CSS. I thought of using rich faces for other cool things which are coming up in future (eg. tab, meuns).
As a first step for using rich faces I tried to use <rich:panel> for one , and tried to get look and feel of default skin.