ADF Faces provides a huge list of server events that you can use with ADF Faces components, events such as ActionEvent with all navigation components, DisclosureEvent with tabs and accordion disclosure, PollEvent with poll components on each tick, SelectionEvent with tables, TreeTable with tree selections, ValueChangeEvent with input's value change, and more.
Tip
You can see all events from the events table in the official documentation at http://docs.oracle.com/middleware/1212/adf/ADFUI/af_event.htm#BABHEEJJ.
This recipe will register two listeners to listen to ActionEvent and ValueChangeEvent, and to track changes of the Input Text and change the Text attribute of a Button.
You can refer to the last recipe, or you can also grab this project's recipe by cloning the ADFFacesServerEvents application from the Git repository.