Jonas Jacobi and John Fallows presented two “quickies”, one on weblets and one on Mabon. Weblets enables you to access resources like images and stylesheets like you would access normal resource, you don’t have to put your images somewhere under the web directory. This allows you to pack these resource into jars files.
Another open source project started by Jonas and John is Mabon, which enables you to access JSF managed beans from an AJAX component. The JSF lifecycle is not designed for this, so they have create a special lifecycle which is a subset of the JSF lifecycle. It does the following steps: apply request values, invoke application, and render response. So no validation and conversion.