The next version of BootsFaces was scheduled to be published during the Easter holidays. However, we decided to spend a few extra weeks to improve the quality of the documentation of the framework. When testing the showcase, we observed that it is a bit confusing because many examples use old API fallen out of grace during the last couple of updates.
The advantage for you is that you can test the release candidate and report bugs you've found. We believe that the release candidate is stable enough to publish it as the final version. Nonetheless, the delay is an opportunity to fix bugs that may have slipped our tests.
Download coordinates
Before starting the long list of details, let me provide you with the download coordinates:
pom.xml:
Preview showcase
The new showcase is available at https://showcase.bootsfaces.net. The preview covers both the new features and the breaking changes. At the same time, the showcase is still work in progress. We'll modify the layout in order to make the pages more useful and easier to grasp. Plus, we're checking for inconsistencies, descriptions of outdated API and other nuisances. If you notice anything that's odd, please report this at our bug tracker so other developers benefit from your sharp eye.
Talking of the bug tracker: currently, there are 64 open issues. That's not as bad as it sounds: most of these 64 issues are proposals how to improve BootsFaces. It goes without saying that we'd prefer to have less than a dozen open issues, but we've learned to accept that a large number of issues indicates that there's an active community. And we're very happy with the BootsFaces community: since October, no less than 23 developers contributed code to BootsFaces. Awesome!
Breaking changes
There are a few breaking changes in BootsFaces 1.1.0. We've reworked the approach to horizontal and inline forms from scratch. It's annoying that this breaks applications relying on the old approach to multi-line inline forms. But after studying the Bootstrap documentation we had to accept that there's no such thing as a Bootstrap multi-line inline form. So we decided to drop our approach in order to spare you a painful migration in the future.
Our short-term plans
We plan to publish the final version of BootsFaces as soon as we've finished working on the showcase. That's a lot of work. Currently, BootsFaces features 76 components, most of them with their individual showcase page. So we expect to finish within the next few weeks. It'd be nice to publish BootsFaces on May 1st, continuing our long tradition of holiday releases, but currently, there's no fixed release date.
Long-term plans
Our long-term plans include adopting Java 8 (which implies dropping support for Java 6 and 7), raising the requirements to JSF 2.2 and higher, and maybe even requiring JavaEE7. There are many pros and cons for each of these ideas, so we're still discussing the topic. You can participate in the discussion by dropping a comment below. We'd like to hear from you!
Another, less controversial, plan is to migrate to Bootstrap 4 when it's available as a final version.