Why I plan to leave RichFaces

Having recently worked with upgrading RichFaces 3.3 to 4.3.1 I have come to the conlusion.... "It basically s*cks". I will give some reasons why:

• Huge makeover of tags
• Removal of tags
• Changes in attibutes
• Too many attributes.

Maybe RF was good when it came, because there was not so much else. But the makeover from 3 to 4 made an upgrade a real pain in the a**.

Googling help for RF in most cases gives result for 3.3.x solutions. I have found it hard to find any useful information about 4 or later. This makes an upgrade hard since it is not easy to find the proper information how things are done with 4.3.x, specially how to replace stuff that is removed from 3.3.x since there is not a decent upgrade guide to be found either. Maybe I have missed some place where all this is written, but weeks of Googling without finding anything is another problem, the documentation s*cks when there is not easy to find what you need.

Makeover of Tags

Some examples: 

List<string> <rich:tooTip/> became <rich:tootip/> ... <rich:tooBar/> became <rich:toobar/>

Removal of tags

rich:modalPanel dissapeared. Well WHY? I think a lot of people used it, now all that code have to be totally rewritten.

rich:layoutPanel was removed. Well now I have found nothing obvious to replace it so back to postitioning by div and css.

Changes in attributes

Take rich:dataTable as an example: some attributes removed, some new, and also changes from camel-case to all lower case attributes but not all. WTF? do you really want someone to use the framework after an upgrade, do not change EVERYTHING. All event-attributes was changed to lowercase ("onRowClick" to "onrowclick"), but not things like "rowClass".

rich:panel: attribute "header"changed meaning from label to space-separated list of styles (???)

Too many attributes

a4j:commandButton: 32 attributes
a4j:commandLing: 37 attributes
rich:dataTable: 34 attributes

This is just a few examples, there is a lot of headache upgrading from 3.3.x to 4.3.x, not only on the surface, if you are using classes in your backing code, be aware, the package structure is also changed, classes have dissapeared and things just stop working. Changing the tags may look hard enough, but when new ones are in place you still probably have strange bugs that need fixing since things that worked before does not work any more.

If I would choose next upgrade, I would not choose RF 5, but go for PrimeFaces instead.