OpenFaces AJAX-powered JSF components EAP2 Released

We are happy to announce the second early access (EAP2) release of the OpenFaces AJAX-powered JSF components. The EAP2 release is the last milestone before the version 2.0 release expected in late September. The EAP2 release adds a new Select Boolean Checkbox component, a number of enhancements, several API changes, and resolves issues reported by the developers during the initial evaluation of EAP1 release.

The Select Boolean Checkbox component introduced in this release is an extended version of the standard andlt;h:selectBooleanCheckboxandgt; component which adds tri-state support (two typical states and the third €œundefined€ one), allows for customizing checkbox images and state-dependent styles.

Following numerous requests from our users we'€™ve also added a new demo application, which shows how OpenFaces components can work together with RichFaces in one application. You can see this demo online, or download the demo and its source code.

Please see the release notes for the full list of enhancements.

Before the OpenFaces 2.0 is released, we also decided to extract a code of the testing system we use for automated tests of OpenFaces components and web applications we build into a separate project called Selenium Inspector. This testing framework, built on top of Selenium, allows testing not only JSF-based applications, but any HTML-based applications. So we felt this code may be useful for wider web development community as a separate project.

The module for testing OpenFaces is already included into the standard Selenium Inspector distribution, and can be downloaded here. The support of RichFaces and other popular JSF frameworks is going to be added after we release OpenFaces 2.0, and hopefully with your contribution.

Give OpenFaces EAP2 and Selenium Inspector a try and let us know what you think.

JxFileWatcher 1.0.1 Released

We are pleased to announce the first maintenance release of JxFileWatcher, a cross-platform library for file system events monitoring.

This release is intended to satisfy the needs of our customers, who want to use JxFileWatcher library as an OSGi bundle and who already use JNIWrapper library in their applications. For more details about changes please read the JxFileWatcher 1.0.1 Release Notes page.

The update is already available for download. You can try the new version online using the WebStart Demo.

If you need assistance with using this product or if you want to discuss the library, welcome to our support forum.

Selenium Inspector 1.0 Released

We are happy to announce the release of Selenium Inspector, an open source library for simplifying automated testing for Web applications. Selenium Inspector is built on top of the popular Selenium testing framework, and enhances its abilities for component-oriented testing, and simplifies testing of any HTML-based applications as well.

Selenium Inspector API allows to create testing solutions for variety of HTML rendering frameworks like JSF component libraries, Spring MVC, Struts, etc. Now web developers can create object-oriented testing APIs for any Web UI library. The Java API for inspecting OpenFaces components is already included.

With Selenium Inspector you'll get the following advantages:

• Ability to check actual view of an element style instead of what is declared in CSS but may not be actually applied.
• Specialized higher-level Java API which simplifies inspection not just on primitive elements, but on compound HTML tags, such as ‹table›,‹ul›, etc.
• A wide set of assertion methods for checking actual values of attributes and styles of HTML elements as well as evaluating actual results of client side expressions.
• Selenium Inspector is easy to customize and extend.
• And its free!

Learn more in the product documentation and the product site.

If you want to share your feedback, thoughts and ideas, or just need an advice, want to submit a feature request or a bug, you are welcome to contribute and participate!