RichFaces

There were a couple of times RichFaces was mentioned in some JavaOne sessions on JSF, so I decided to take a quick look at it and try it out. The Online demo looked impressive, there are some really cool AJAX components like Drag n Drop, Auto Complete, Ajaxed Tabbed pane, Tree etc. Very quickly I was able to get the demo running in Sybase EAServer 6.0.1

Ofcourse, from my experience before, there are a couple of hacks to make it work in EAServer. The load-on-startup for the Faces Servlet had to be set to 0 in web.xml.

<servlet>
<servlet-name>Faces Servlet</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>javax.faces.webapp.FacesServlet</servlet-class>
<load-on-startup>0</load-on-startup>
</servlet>

This is because, EAServer calls servlet init() before the ServletContextInitializer. Not an EAServer bug, this is in Servlet 2.3 spec.

In a few minutes, I was able to use these RichFaces components in my web app. Great job Exadel, you rock.