Hey Alexander,

I did not know you were the only one who created this framework. ("Alexander is the founder of the Ajax4jsf project, which he started as a personal side effort.")

This stuff is great..I thought it was a JBOSS product. I understand now..how do you handle all the work? Do you have a staff?

Phil

http://developer.redhatmagazine.com/2008/05/12/ajax4jsf-a-chat-about-the-richfaces-framework-with-alexander-smirnov/

jax4jsf - a chat about the RichFaces framework with Alexander Smirnov
by Karsten Wade

At the JBoss booth at JavaOne 2008, I spoke with RichFaces developer Alexander Smirnov (OGG, MP3.) Alexander is the founder of the Ajax4jsf project, which he started as a personal side effort. It grew out of his interest in JSF and was originally run as a stand alone, self-hosted project.

As he developed Ajax4jsf, Alexander began working with the MyFaces community, and started communicating more with the larger JSF community. He moved the project to SourceForge at the suggestion of RichFaces lead developer Sergey Smirnov (no relation.) Exadel began developing the RichFaces JSF components library and Alexander joined the project as a framework background developer.

At the time it moved to java.net, Ajax4jsf had grown more useful when integrated with the RichFaces component library. RichFaces, however, was still not open source. The combined projects came to the attention of JBoss, which contracted with Exadel to open source both projects as JBoss projects. These were recently combined into a single project under the RichFaces name, available through JBoss.org. (RichFaces is combined with the JBoss Tools Eclipse-based developer environment to make up the JBoss Developer Studio subscription offering.)

Current activity for the RichFaces project includes a focus on building RichFaces functionality within JBoss Portlet Bridge. JBoss Portlet Bridge implements JSR-301 to provide support for not only JSF running in a portal, but also Seam and RichFaces.

Joining forces with JBoss has brought significantly more usage, ten times or more in terms of downloads. In particular, Alexander says there is an obvious increase in forum questions and discussions. In terms of attracting contributors, there are currently very few code contributions from the community outside of Exadel and JBoss. Alexander and Sergey describe the development process for the RichFaces team as being structured with a well-oiled process, which creates a higher barrier of entry for people outside of the team. As early ways to bring in external contributors, there are current needs for testing, defining future requirements, and requesting features and enhancements.

For the future roadmap of RichFaces, Alexander says that the next step is toward semantic web technologies.

This entry was posted by Karsten Wade on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 8:24 pm and is filed under Java, JBoss, Ajax4jsf, RichFaces, Audio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.