Ajax4JSF Rocks

Last week I’ve spent quite some playing with Ajax4JSF and after creating everything in my mind using it I’ve become a true fan. I’d definitely say that Ajax4JSF is the best Ajax-JSF framework out there.

Ajaxifying existing JSF applications became simple mainly because of the a4j:support component. Consider a common case where there are two dependent combos to select country-select. If it’s done with pure Ajax, there’s a lots of js and xml involved which makes the picture a bit messy. But adding a4j:support component to the parent combo as a child brings ajax in a second. In general it’s  very easy to ajaxify an existing component with a js event. Just specify the js event and the server side action, then it’s ready.

The other feature is my favorite, partial page updates. Since ajax requests are related with a part of the page not the whole page, getting validation errors that have nothing to do with the ajax request is annoying. Ajax4Jsf resolves this issue by using ajax regions and encapsulates the ajaxified part from the rest of the page by only decoding the components inside a zone, pretty cool.

There are other cool components in the framework like a4j:include that can be used to create ajaxified wizards or like a4j:keepAlive which is similiar to tomahawk savestate but the two features I’ve described above are my favorites. Lately in myfaces mailing list we had a discussion about which ajax framework to use and I think it’s easy to guess what I think.