Richfaces not working without old ViewHandler?

Question

In JSF application we are using richfaces (Final.3.3.3). In pom.xml there is dependency on jsf-api-2.0.2, jsf-impl-2.0.2 and jsf-facelets-1.1.15.jar, and in faces-config.xml there is <view-handler> configured like this:

<application>
  <view-handler>com.sun.facelets.FaceletViewHandler</view-handler>
</application>

I know that in JSF2 you don't need jsf-facelets. You also don't need to configure <view-handler> in faces-config.xml. So I removed facelets jar and <view-handler> line from faces-config.xml. But when I did it, richfaces didn't work. E.g. rich:toolBarGroup is not shown.

There is javascript error "document.body is null" that comes from a4j javascript file.

Does richfaces need this specific ViewHandler from jsf-facelets?

Answer 1

Amorfis there is no way of using Richfaces 3.3.3 without adding ViewHandler and facelet-1.1.15 jar as it does not have full support for JSF 2.0..

Answer 2

Richfaces 3.3.3 does not fully support all the features of JSF2 according to This. You still need facelets. Specifically, the following is quoted from the limitations list on that page:

RichFaces 3.3.3 does not support JSF 2 built-in facelets (VDL)

Facelets 1.1.15 should still be used because of dependencies in RichFaces from the Tag Handlers classes.