JSF component vendor Infragistics released this week the first public beta of its next JSF component library, NetAdvantage for JSF Vol I. The library consists of a dozen complex JSF components that can be imported into a JSF-aware IDE's component palette, and connected to server-side data components to assemble an interactive user experience.

Infragistics chief technical evangelist Jason Beres noted in an interview with Artima that interactive charting components are the major new feature of this release:

This is the culmination of about eight months of work... The new charting component does 2D and 3D charts, and it provides all the charts you would expect for business use: pie charts, donut charts, clusters, lines, overlay charts, as well as candlestick and area charts where you start getting into what financial firms might use for showing, for instance, open, high, and low prices.

Our whole framework is built using Ajax. What that means is that our components can be used in an unbound mode, when you just add those items to a page, and can also be bound to data from a backing bean.

In the bound mode, the charts can change in real time. Say, you have a grid displaying some data, and in another area of the page you have a chart representing visually the data in the grid. If a user changes the data, or if the data in the grid changes via a real-time feed from the server, we can update the chart to reflect changes to the data.

That data update is done through a technology we call Smart Refresh. Smart Refresh allows you to update the data contents of one component from another component. For instance, typing something in a text box will cause a chart or a grid to update. A developer can enable Smart Refresh by setting an attribute on the JSF component.

Beres also noted another new feature in Infragistic's grid component:

We also did some work on our grid control. It’s a very high-capacity data grid, and we added an export to Excel capability to it. With just one line of script, you can take whatever is displayed in the grid, and it can open up in an Excel spreadsheet. We use some technology from the .NET side of our company to generate the binary Microsoft Excel format, which means you don’t have to worry about the [Excel] files getting messed up with MIME types, and they will work in any version of Excel.

The NetAdvantage for JSF library is licensed via a subscription model, and the final release will be available at the end of April. Integration with Eclipse, Sun Java Studio Creator, and JBuilder is complete; other IDEs, such as NetBeans, are also supported, with the exception of integration with the visual component palette.

One of JSF's initial promises was to simplify Web application development with a component-based programming model. Do you believe that JSF has thus far delivered on that promise?

(For in-depth discussion of JSF and JSP features introduced in Java EE 5, read the Artima interview with JSF and JSP: What's New in Java EE 5: A Conversation with Ed Burns and Jan Luehe.)