After seven weeks of hard work, we've published BootsFaces 0.9.0. It's a major improvement over BootsFaces 0.8.6. Unfortunately, a little error slipped through our QA gate: It seems we've involuntarily published a Java 8 version. If you are using Java 6 or 7, you'll have to wait until 0.9.1 comes out in a few weeks, or you may use the developer snapshot on Maven Central. It was a small bug, easy enough to fix it within a day.
While BootsFaces 0.9.0 is more than a bug-fix version, it clearly concentrates on polishing BootsFaces, removing bugs and finishing things we had started in previous versions. That's not a small achievement: 
the number of commits on GitHub went from 856 (BootsFaces 0.8.6) to 1028. And that's only the base library. The showcase has improved a lot, too. And we've managed to finish a component many developers desperately need: <b:dataTable />. What makes this component unique in the JSF world is that it is rendered on the client. That makes it feel a lot faster and much more responsive than traditional server-side data tables. We've already received a lot of bug reports and enhancement requests, even during the development phase. Thus I'm sure the data table will remain in our focus during the new few updates of BootsFaces.
A more liberal license
Probably the most important point of BootsFaces 0.9.0 is the license. Now, BootsFaces is available under an Apache V2 license being a lot more liberal than the old GPL V3 license. For example, you can use BootsFaces in commercial products without further ado.
Download coordinates
Before starting the long list of details, let me provide you with the download coordinates:
pom.xml:
Download coordinates of the developer snapshot
Like mentioned above, we've already provided a version of BootsFaces that's compatible with both Java 6 and Java 7. It's available on the "sneak preview" snapshot repository of Maven Central. Follow the link to learn how to get the sneap preview version.
Big tickets
There are a couple of big tickets:
- We've finished the datatable and the tree widgets.
- We've started to implement components explicitely addressing mobile devices. BootsFaces 0.9.0 offers
<b:shake />and<b:gyroscope />. The first component enables JSF applications to react to shake gestures, whereas the second component enables you to detect the rotation of your smartphone. Traditionally, both features are only accessible to JavaScript programmers. We are very curious how JSF developers are going to use these components. - We've added a lot of attributes to almost every component. Now, every visible component has a
styleand astyle-classattribute. Complex components even have several sets of style attribute (e.g. for the header, the footer and the content area). - Most visible components now directly support the responsive attributes like
col-md="12"orvisible=">=md". That's equivalent to wrapping the components in a<b:column />, but it's less keystrokes for you, and in some cases it's even more efficient HTML code.
JAAS
JAAS is a popular authorization standard requiring a very specific login form. Earlier versions of BootsFaces couldn't be used with JAAS because BootsFaces rendered the wrong name attribute in the HTML code. We've added an option to support JAAS.
Relaxed, HTML5-like coding style
A detail making JSF a bit clumsy is the need to precede every JSF component with a prefix. JSF 2.2 adds a new, HTML5-like coding style using pass-through elements. BootsFaces 0.9.0 optionally takes this to another level. You can omit the b: prefix of every BootsFaces element, and some standard HTML elements are automatically converted to their BootsFaces counterparts. In particular, the <b:selectOneMenu /> benefits from that. If you're like me, you can't remember the name of the component. If you activate the optional relaxed coding style of BootsFaces, you don't have to remember the name. A simple HTML <select /> element is automatically converted to a BootsFaces JSF element: