Eclipse Platform

Now that RichFaces 3.3.3 is out, plus JBoss Tools 3.1 was released in March, let me show you the easiest way to start with RichFaces and Tomcat 6. This doesn’t involve Maven. I’ll write a post about Maven and RichFaces some other time.

The following steps assume you have JBoss Tools 3.0 or 3.1 installed. Just in case you don’t have JBoss Tools installed, skip to section Installing JBoss Tools 3.1 at the end.

Getting RichFaces project

1. Download RichFaces start project
2. In Eclipse, select File/Import/General/Existing Project nto Workspace
3. Check Select archive file and click Browse…
4. Find and select richfaces-start.zip
5. Click Finish
6. Once the project is imported, in Servers view, right-click Tomcat server and select Add and Remove…
7. Move richfaces-start to the right side
8. Start the server
9. Right-click richfaces-start project and select Run As/Run nn Server

You should see a page like this:

The project even comes with a very short custom skin (laguna14). Look for the skin file in JavaSource folder. The application also uses a4j:insert tag and a4j implicit object.

Installing JBoss Tools 3.1

1. Download and install Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers 3.5.2
2. In Eclipse, go to Help/Install New Software…
3. Click Add
4. For name, enter JBoss Tools 3.1
5. For URL, enter http://download.jboss.org/jbosstools/updates/JBossTools-3.1.0.GA/
6. Click OK
7. Select the just added software link
8. When a list of features appears, select Web and Java EE Development
9. Click Finish. This will install JBoss Tools
10. Launch Eclipse
11. Add Tomcat 6 server (you can do it via Servers view)
12. Go back to step #1 in Getting RichFaces project section

Related Stories

• The Easiest Way to Transfer PDF to PPT on Mac