We're proud to announce that today we've released OmniFaces 2.1. OmniFaces is a utility library for JSF that provides a lot of utilities to make working with JSF much easier.

OmniFaces 2.1 is the second release that will depend on JSF 2.2 and CDI 1.1 from Java EE 7. Since Java EE 7 availability remains somewhat scarce, we maintain a no-frills 1.x branch for JSF 2.0 (without CDI) as well.

The easiest way to use OmniFaces 2.1 is via Maven by adding the following to pom.xml:

<dependency> <groupId>org.omnifaces</groupId> <artifactId>omnifaces</artifactId> <version>2.1</version> </dependency>

Alternatively the jars files can be downloaded directly.

A complete overview of all that's new can be found on the what's new page, and some more details can be found in BalusC's blogpost about this release.

As usual the release contains an assortment of new features, some changes and a bunch of fixes. One particular fix that took some time to get right is getting a CDI availability check to work correctly with Tomcat + OpenWebBeans (OWB). After a long discussion we finally got this to work, with special thanks to Mark Struberg and Ludovic Pénet.

One point worth noting is that since we joined the JSF EG, our time has to be shared between that and working on OmniFaces. In addition some code that's now in OmniFaces might move to JSF core (such as already happened for the IterableDataModel in order to support the Iterable interface in UIData and UIRepeat). For the OmniFaces 2.x line this will have no effect though, but for OmniFaces 3.x (which will focus on JSF 2.3) it may.

We will start planning soon for OmniFaces 2.2. Feature requests are always welcome ;)

Arjan Tijms