Rich Faces - History

History

RichFaces originated from Ajax4jsf framework which was created and designed by Alexander Smirnov. In the autumn of 2005 Smirnov joined Exadel and continued to develop the framework. The first version of what would become Ajax4jsf was released in March 2006. Later in the same year, Exadel VCP was split off and the Ajax4jsf framework and Rich Faces was born. While RichFaces provided out-of-the-box components (a "component-centric" Ajax approach, where components do everything you need), Ajax4jsf provided page-wide Ajax support. Developers specify which parts of the page should be processed on server after some client side user actions and which parts should be updated after processing. Ajax4jsf became an open source project hosted on Java.net while RichFaces became a commercial JSF component library.

In March 2007 JBoss (now a division of Red Hat) and Exadel signed a partnership agreement where Ajax4jsf and RichFaces would now be under the JBoss umbrella and be called JBoss Ajax4jsf and JBoss RichFaces. RichFaces would now also be open source and free. In September 2007, JBoss and Exadel decided to merge Ajax4jsf and RichFaces under the RichFaces name. It made sense as both libraries were now free and open source. Having just one product solved many version and compatibility issues that existed before, such as which version of Ajax4jsf works with what version of RichFaces.