Exadel has announced the availability of RichFaces - Exadel Visual Component Platform 2.0 for delivering enterprise-level Web applications based on JavaServer Faces (JSF). RichFaces is a components library that can be integrated into new or existing JSF-based Web applications. RichFaces is built on top of open source framework Ajax4jsf. With RichFaces, developers can add Ajax functionality to an application with less code. RichFaces is also fully compatible with all standard JSF components, including components from the Sun JSF reference implementation and Apache MyFaces. New features in this latest version of RichFaces include:

• For skin-enabled components, an increased number of available themes and skins and more flexibility for developers to adjust the look-and-feel of an application without replacing standard components
• For Ajax-enabled components, a wider range of Ajax componenets such as calendar, debug components, suggestion box and slide panel components
• Complete support for JSF implementations: JSF 1.1 RI, JSF 1.1.2 My Faces, JSF 1.2 RI

What do you think of RichFaces - Exadel Visual Component Platform 2.0? Be sure to check out TSS.com's tech talk with Exadel senior systems engineer Max Katz on Ajax4jsf.

Congrats guys!! These folks are usually pretty quiet in the JSF-impl world, but they have been showing some unbelievable innovation with components and tools for JSF.

Congrats guys!! These folks are usually pretty quiet in the JSF-impl world, but they have been showing some unbelievable innovation with components and tools for JSF.

I'll second that. They're on the ball in terms of tools (with Exadel Studio Pro) and with components and AJAX. Good stuff. Kito D. Mann Author, JavaServer Faces in Action http://www.virtua.com - JSF/Java EE consulting, training, and mentoring http://www.JSFCentral.com - JavaServer Faces FAQ, news, and info

I've got Exadel Studio Pro which does a decent job of supporting Struts development. I've been thinking about upgrading to Exadel VCP, but I am also considering Bea Workshop Studio (which they bought from M7 Nitrox). Does anyone know how they compare? I'm mainly interested in their support for JSF and AJAX. Support for Hibernate, Kodo, EJB3, etc. is not of much interest for me right now. One thing I don't like about Exadel Studio Pro is that their Struts validation only works when you open a .jsp page. There is apparently no way to make it validate all of your .jsp pages when you do a build through Eclipse or Ant. I'd definitely like an Ant task that I could call to get the Struts and JSF validation features that these tools offer through Ant.

I'm an Exadel user, and I have somewhat of a conflicted view on the product as of late (Exadel Pro 4.0).. On the one side, Exadel seem to be on target with the features, the IDE is really user-friendly, has all the right features and so on. But on the otherside, it's sluggishness, CPU and memory intensiveness etc makes it more or less unusable at times on a recent AMD64-processor with 2GB RAM). So to me it seems, Exadel are probably due for a development round of hard-core optimization and bug-fixing before rushing headlong with more features. The IDE being extremely sluggish and frequently more or less useless for a minute or so at a time is not exactly optimal. I really do like Exadel Studio, but these issues are a big pain.. They have a promising set of products that could really kick some serious ass if they addressed these issues.

+1 I decided to browse TheServerSide while waiting for Exadel to rebuild my project workspace and I encountered this posting. Very funny! I am a big fan of their Facelets support and the very well thought out Ajax support for JSF. Too bad about the lousy IDE performance and shaky stability. Come on Exadel. You have a good thing here. Just needs a little polishing!

I'm an Exadel user, and I have somewhat of a conflicted view on the product as of late (Exadel Pro 4.0)..

On the one side, Exadel seem to be on target with the features, the IDE is really user-friendly, has all the right features and so on.
But on the otherside, it's sluggishness, CPU and memory intensiveness etc makes it more or less unusable at times on a recent AMD64-processor with 2GB RAM).

So to me it seems, Exadel are probably due for a development round of hard-core optimization and bug-fixing before rushing headlong with more features. The IDE being extremely sluggish and frequently more or less useless for a minute or so at a time is not exactly optimal.

I really do like Exadel Studio, but these issues are a big pain.. They have a promising set of products that could really kick some serious ass if they addressed these issues.

WTP requires more allocated memory that Eclipse takes by default. Ecpecially, the setting of PermSize is important. The is a recommended parameter for eclipse.ini file: -vmargs -Xms128m -Xmx512m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m P.S. Source: http://blog.exadel.com/?p=9 .

Good news. Our company is one of your customers. I always think the big rival of your product is myeclipse. http://www.developerzone.biz

Thank you for your suggest. However, I would like to say that this post is not about a tool, actually. RichFaces is a tool-agnostic run-time library of JSF components. No particular tool is required to develop web application using RichFaces. I.e. you can use any of them.

exadel studio <=3 be very very hard to use, now it's better but i can't say it's stable, and agree that polishing is very need for exadel studio (and support jboss seam ;))