RichFaces - Architecture

According to Red Hat official document, there are a total five components that work internally to provide rich user experience. Following are the five components.

• AJAX Filter − AJAX filter is used to differentiate between different types of request coming from the client browser. To include this component into the application, you need to register RichFaces Filter in your application’s web.xml file. AJAX Filter acts differently in different phases of JSF applications.

• AJAX Action Components − Action components are responsible to send the client requests from the browser to the AJAX Engine, from where it will process the request and render the required view as a response.

• AJAX Containers − AJAX container is conceptually similar to the spring container. It is basically recognizing a specific area of the client browser to process the AJAX request.

• Skinnability − Skin and theme together is referred to as Skinnability. This module acts independently to provide extensive support to the look and feel of the entire.

• RichFaces JavaScript Engine − JavaScript Engine runs on the client side that sends updates to the AJAX engine in order to prepare the response. This engine works automatically, hence we need not write any extra line of code to control it.

Following is the architectural diagram of the RichFaces application in MVC paradigm.

In the above image, the user’s activity will be processed as a “JS Event”. Later, the “JS Event” will be transmitted to the “XML Filter”, which is nothing but a component of AJAX Filter. “XML Filter” is responsible for generating and processing user requests. All other components are internal to the different jar files. We need to use appropriate tags library in order to use those functionalities.