Although the big AJAX hype is over, today a web application cannot be taken seriously if it doesn’t leverage some AJAX functionality. And that’s a good thing, as AJAX can help us to make our applications more interactive and user-friendly. In the early days of Trinidad, when it was still called Oracle ADF Faces, and before the big AJAX hype started off, it already had a feature called "Partial Page Rendering", or PPR for short. In those days this feature used inline frames under the hood.
Today Trinidad still calls this feature Partial Page Rendering, although it’s now based on "real" AJAX technologies, such as XMLHttpRequest
and JavaScript. That is, by the way, a great example of the benefits of the abstraction that JSF components give us. Because of this abstraction, the Trinidad team was able to re-implement the whole Partial Page Rendering feature using AJAX technology, while keeping the way we use Partial Page Rendering in our pages the same...