I am currently using the JBoss RichFaces JSF component library for the project I am working on. It works quite well in general, especially the AJAX support provided by ajax4jsf (A4J), but I find the usually very inflexible table-markup used for almost every component and all this "skin" stuff of RichFaces quite annoying. It would be nice if there were some components which just provided the functionality and only minimal markup/style. Originally I had planned to use ICEfaces, but that didn't work too well either and also brings a lot of predefined styles with it, so for now RichFaces seems to be the best option.
Now I thought it would be nice to develop a clean tag library which provides some useful components found in RichFaces, ICEfaces or Tomahawk (not all of course!), which don't use any predefined style and generate markup which can be styled easily with CSS.
I wanted to use the ajax4jsf library for AJAX support, because I think it works quite nicely, and integrates seamlessly into standard JSF with facelets. But it seems that since it has moved over to JBoss, it isn't available as a standalone library anymore. You can only download the whole RichFaces package, which I don't want.
Is the ajax4jsf (A4J) project dead? If it is, what alternatives are there?
If you read the ajax4jsf forum you'll see that it's been merged with Richfaces.
You don't have to use the Richfaces components on your page, so do you have an issue with having the JARs in your project?
I agree that many JSF components (not just Richfaces) are based on tables (eg. h:selectManyCheckbox). Don't forget that it's easy to write a new renderer for many of these. I've done this for the h:selectManyCheckbox so that the checkboxes are rendered inside divs instead of a table. I would think that you should be able to do the same for Richfaces components...but if that's the case, then why use them?
You may find it easier/nicer using jQuery UI elements and tie them back to your Beans with a4j:jsFunction (or similar).