A serious problem: Lack of support in this community as far as technical problems are concerned

[agallo73]

Hello, we actually use Rich Faces and JSF for some projects.

I recentelly migrated from version 3.3 to 4.3.1 Final and had several troubles due to several implementation changes that took away backward compatibility with the previous version.

It should not happen but  you are clearly  free to design what you think is better.

What surprises me more is the total lack of support in this community.

I saw many questions unanswered.

Me too tried to post some questions and had no reply.

It's really too strange for a community promoting open source and related to JBoss.

I had no reply ad far as a critical selection problem, I had no reply as far as multiple file upload is concerned and I see that the same thing happens for many other users.

I think that this is a vey critical problem that may prevent many people from adopting this technology or let them abandon RichFaces in favour of other more supported frameworks.

I'd be greatful if You could provide me with some feedback related to this concern in order me to know if You are willing to promote this framework and support it or we have to arrange by our selves without having any support or reply to our problems.

Excuse me if I am too direct.I know that probably yopu are very busy.  I do not like disturbing and always lose many time trying to solve problems by myslef and just post when I do not succeed in it. In these situations, support is very important for me, without it, I  will feel foced to use an other framework.

Thanks in advance

[bleathem]

Thanks Antonio for voicing your concern, it's always better to bring these things up for discussion!

The approach we have been taking with the RichFaces forums lately is to focus on enabling community members help each out in the forums, while the core dev team focus on development and issue (jira) resolution.  If this approach is not working, we will have to consider making some adjustments, and focus more core developer time on answering forum posts.  I'm also considering splitting the forum to host RichFaces 3 and RichFaces 4 topics separately.  This might more easily enable the community to identify topics with which they are able to provide assitance.

Any other ideas you have on improving the responsiveness would be much appreciated.

Brian

[agallo73]

Hello Brian, thanks for your reply. I think that your idea to split forum is very good since it might help users easily identifying discussions and finding solutions. I also think that even if helping each other is always a good idea, many times there are some concerns that

can be addressed only by someone knowing the internals. In these cases ( and looking at the questions posted i think that they are the most cases) it's very important to have some of you providing support. Look at the items posted in these days. Almost all have 0 replies or , when there's a reply, it's from the same user posting or some other one having the same problem. I think that many people may feel  disconfortable when need to find a solution and , after many attempts, they are unable to addres their problem and none of you may support them neither. I posted in several communities and always had immediate replies from the team's members. So please try to dedicate some of your very precious time to supporting us. I ensure you that it will be greatly appreciated from all su and it's not wasted time. Thanks again. Bye

[lfryc]

+1 for splitting forums (it will make forums much more clear from the beginning)

More generally, don't tell us what we should do for you, ask yourself what you can do for the community!

1. Forums presense and trying to answer less technical things for a start.
2. Using IRC for addressing more technical / conceptual questions.

Anyone willing to write a blog on how to effectively address issues with RichFaces? ;-)

I believe it will really help, I can help you give together an outline.

[lfryc]

Blog outline:

For a start, I would say issues are generally caused by lack of initial investigation:

• review browser console + server console
• review all resources (JavaScript, CSS) were loaded correctly
• attach <a4j:log mode="console" level="debug" />
  • logging into browser console
• review request headers and generated response / partial response
  • if the response doesn't contain anything but viewState, then there is something wrong ;-)

Generally this comes down to the understanding how to debug client-side code.

Then, it comes to server-side debugging, where some experience with Java debugging is necessary.

And of course, quite detailed knowledge about JSF.

Putting a breakpoint in an known class (bean's action, listener, PhaseListener) is always good start.

Anyone would like to create a blog/wiki with such a content?

----

Sometimes, lack of knowledge about how JSF works is a blocker how to effectively solve the issue.

So the sources how to effectively get this knowledge would allow others to overcome issues in a future.

[bleathem]

Lukas, that's a great outline, and definately covers what one should do when investigating a bug or error in the framework.  However, I'd say many of the questions in the forums don't fall into that category.  There are a lot questions about "How do I do <something>", or "I tried <this> and it dosn't work" - such posts would not be well covered by your proposed outline.  In such cases, posting code samples helps, but posting too long a code sample can make the forum post too time consuming to digest.

Here's a great blog post on how to phrase questions for this latter category:

http://msmvps.com/blogs/jon_skeet/archive/2010/08/29/writing-the-perfect-question.aspx