OmniFaces 2.0 is here!

On November, 24, Bauke Scholtz (aka BalusC) and Arjan Tijms announced on OmniFaces official website that a new OmniFaces version has been released! These are great news for the JSF community since the previous OmniFaces version, which was 1.8.1, had over 1600 downloads only in October!

It’s a fact! OmniFaces is growing and it becomes even more popular each day, which is a good thing, since as you will discover in this blog, OmniFaces is not just a utility library for JSF applications, but also a GREAT source of inspiration for every JSF developer (see OmniFaces source code – it contains powerful techniques)!
Regarding to its current release, OmniFaces comes with the following improvements:

Major in OmniFaces 2.0
    -    Dependencies are changed from Java 1.6, JSF 2.0, Servlet 2.5, EL 2.1 to Java 1.7, JSF 2.2, Servlet 3.0, EL 2.2 and CDI 1.1; as of now, OmniFaces 2.0 is still backwards compatible with JSF 2.1, but not with JSF 2.0 anymore
    -    OmniFaces initialization will explicitly fail if CDI BeanManager is unavailable application startup
    -    Events utility class has major method renames to clarify the meaning
    -    Beans utility class doesn't take BeanManager anymore as argument

Added in OmniFaces 2.0 (does NOT apply to OmniFaces 1.10)
    -    NoAutoGeneratedIdViewHandler which throws a runtime exception when an autogenerated JSF client ID is being rendered
    -    <o:viewParamValidationFailed> which enables sending either a redirect or error status on validation failure of view parameters
    -    <o:graphicImage> which is capable of referencing a byte[] or InputStream property with optional support for data URI format
    -    @Param now supports directly injecting the (auto-converted) value
    -    <o:moveComponent> via which components, facets and behaviors can be moved at runtime to a target component in various ways
    -    <o:resolveComponent> via which a component can be looked up by its ID and a reference to it put in various scopes
    -    <o:validateBean> now supports validating beans at the class level
    -    Servlets utility class got a bunch of new methods related to cookies and JSF
    -    New BeansLocal utility class next to Beans class with the same philosophy as Faces/FacesLocal

Changed in OmniFaces 2.0 (also applies to OmniFaces 1.10)
    -    Default validation message of ValidateMultipleFields components can now be supplied via <message-bundle>
    -    <o:viewParam> enables support for @NotNull and Pre/PostValidateEvent even when parameter is not specified, on contrary to <f:viewParam>
    -    Html5RenderKit is now not forgiving anymore on broken renderers that don't pass the current component to the write methods (fixes "plain HTML" mess-up)
    -    Skip null/empty values in <o:validateOrder> as that's actually the responsibility of required="true"
    -    CDNResourceHandler and CombinedResourceHandler can now be disabled via a web.xml context param supporting a request based EL expression

Fixed in OmniFaces 2.0 (also applies to OmniFaces 1.10)
    -    Set system default timezone in CDI @FacesConverter when web.xml context param says so
    -    Components#hasInvokedSubmit() failed in iterating components such as UIData and UIRepeat
    -    Fixed <o:massAttribute> to only consider own children instead of those of parent
    -    GzipResponseFilter is made better compatible with Servlet 3.1 containers

Major in OmniFaces 1.10
    -    All CDI specific features are removed, this version is specifically for OmniFaces 1.0-1.5 users on outdated environments who can't upgrade to 1.6 or newer due to conflicts in CDI; OmniFaces users who were already successfully using CDI on a JSF 2.1 environment should be able to effortlessly upgrade to OmniFaces 2.0

Sounds great! But how can I get my hands on this? Pretty simple! If you use Maven, then you can download OmniFaces 2.0 by adding the following in your pom.xml:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.omnifaces</groupId>
    <artifactId>omnifaces</artifactId>
    <version>2.0</version>
</dependency>

Or, if you need OmniFaces without CDI dependency, you can add:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.omnifaces</groupId>
    <artifactId>omnifaces</artifactId>
    <version>1.10</version>
</dependency>

For non-Maven users, OmniFaces 2.0 jar is available here, while OmniFaces 1.10 here.