Packt is pleased to announce a new book, Apache MyFaces Trinidad 1.2: A Practical Guide that helps Java developers, develop JSF web applications using Trinidad and Seam. Written by David Thomas, this book will help developers strengthen their understanding of all the major concepts through a step-by-step approach.

Apache MyFaces Trinidad is a powerful JSF component framework that includes a large, enterprise quality component library which supports critical features such as accessibility and right-to-left languages. It also includes features such as integrated client-side validation as well as a dialog framework. Trinidad is more than just a component library because it also contains additional features which solve common development challenges.

Apache MyFaces Trinidad 1.2: A Practical Guide, will help developers combine Apache MyFaces Trinidad with Seam in-order to develop rich-client web applications. They will gain a comprehensive understanding of how to implement login, authorization, navigation, internationalization, polling, and support for browser issues with the help of these technologies.

By using this book, users will be able to develop a web application that illustrates all the standard UI types covered by Trinidad. They will learn occurring tag attributes, and will gain a complete understanding of Trinidad's AJAX technology and its partial page rendering technique. By the end of the book, they would be well-versed with all the major concepts of Trinidad.

Java developers who are beginners at JSF and experienced web developers who are looking for an introduction into the world of open source JSF technology will find this book an interesting and beneficial read. This book is out now and available from Packt. For more information, please visit: www.packtpub.com/apache-myfaces-trinidad-1-2-a-practical-guide/book

JBoss RichFaces 3.3 by Demetrio Filocamo is almost 300 pages long and aims to teach developers how to using RichFaces applications rather than just providing a set of API references.

The book is broadly split into 3 sections.

The first section provides an introduction to RichFaces. An overview and history of RichFaces is provided in chapter 1 followed by a discussion on the features available with RichFaces such as AJAX functionality and skinnability. Chapter 2 of the book provides details on how to start using RichFaces within your applications. Initially, explaining how seamgen can be downloaded and installed provides this. Seamgen is a set of build scripts that are provided with JBoss Seam distributions which create ANT scripts to build, test and deploy Seam applications. If you are not using Seam, the next section of this chapter shows how to integrate RichFaces into standard JSF applications.

I found the content informative, but felt that prior knowledge of Seam would be useful in understanding what is being explained. Finally in this section, the author provides details of Eclipse/JBoss Tools, JBoss Developer Studio and IntelliJ Idea showing where to get each piece of software. I found it strange that no mention of NetBeans was provided here. Admittedly, the support for Seam projects is superior in Eclipse to NetBeans, but NetBeans provides solid JSF/RichFaces support for non-Seam projects.

The next section of the book takes the user through developing a fully blown application using RichFaces and Seam. Again, I felt that prior knowledge of Seam would be useful. During this section, the author shows how to build a working “Contact Manager” application. The application is built from scratch using seamgen as the build system. The author explains the structure of seamgen created projects and shows how many different RichFaces components can be used to create a fully functional AJAX web application. With each form that is created for the application, the web code (facelets) is shown together with the corresponding Seam components acting as JSF backing beans. This is by far the biggest section of the book and provides lot of detail on RichFaces. Sections on skinning, internationalization, user registration and displaying data lists are all provided in detail with particular reference to RichFaces. Where relevant, each of these sections shows how AJAX functionality (provided by default by RichFaces) can easily be employed to enhance the users experience.

The final section of the book shows how some of the more advanced features of RichFaces can be used. Chapters 8 and 9 show how RichFaces skins can be customized and how Maven can be used to create new skins using the RichFaces CDK. The final 2 chapters of the book show how new components can be developed with the RichFaces CDK (a star rating component is created) and how some of the more advanced AJAX components (push and pull) can be used within web applications.

Altogether this is a good book on RichFaces, but it does assume that the reader has some knowledge of developing enterprise applications and in particular I feel that prior knowledge of JBoss Seam would be greatly beneficial to reading the book. This book is recommended for web application developers using JBoss RichFaces.

Thanks to Packt Publishing for providing me the copy of this book to review.