Following the donation of its ADF Faces JSF library to the open source community as Apache MyFaces Trinidad, late 2005, Oracle today announced that it will donate all the Rich Components currently being developed and rolled out in the JDeveloper11g Technical Preview to the Apache foundation as well. Note that the announcement did not mention any specific dates for when the components will be available from the Apache repository.
This set of pure JSF components offer a rich user experience, based on Ajax technologies using JavaScript, DHTML, CSS etc. And the good thing is: it is completely declarative. Getting the AJAX, Web 2.0 functionality, we do not have to program anything. You do not see the JavaScript. You set a few properties in the JSF components and that is all that is required.
Duncan Mills from the JDeveloper team demonstrated during the general session by Thomas Kurian how simple it is to add (client side) drag & drop behavior, in this case to be able to drag thumbnails for DVDs to shopping cart ‘area’. It literally takes two attributes to be set, enabling one component as drop target and another one as a draggable element.
Other cool components include:
- table with stretchable, draggable columns and stepless data scrolling (fetching data sets from the server as required, allowing the user to scroll through 1000s of records without noticeable delay)
- sliders, spinners
- charts (rendered as Flash, SGV or PNG, by just setting property on the JSF component)
- accordion
- popup and popup menu
- panel splitter
- panel stretchlayout (a container that stretches the center child element to make use of all the available space)
- list of values component
- select date and select color
- tabs
- tree
- …
Open source frameworks such as this one make you wonder how on earth commercial vendors of similar frameworks will be able to survive. The Java Pavilion seems to offer dozens of commercial rich web component vendors – I doubt whether (m)any of them will be around this time next year.
Note: this article was posted on the OTN Home Page during JavaOne 2007:
