Apache Proxy Breaks RichFaces

I’ve run into this twice now, so I wanted to document it here to help other folks, and to see if anyone knows the root cause of the issue.

When using RichFaces with Seam, things work just fine on my local development JBoss instance. But when I deploy the same EAR file up to my production JBoss instance, which is sitting behind an Apache proxy, everything works EXCEPT the rich/ajax stuff.

The issue was that the JavaScript located here: ContextRoot/a4j_3_1_4.GAorg.ajax4jsf.javascript.AjaxScript

would not load.

My Apache proxy was configured like this:

	ProxyPass /10MinuteMail balancer://mycluster/10MinuteMail/
	ProxyPass /10MinuteMail/* balancer://mycluster/10MinuteMail/
	ProxyPassReverse /10MinuteMail http://127.0.0.1:8080/10MinuteMail

With mycluster defined like this:

        
                AddDefaultCharset off
                Order deny,allow
                Allow from all

		BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:8080
                #Allow from .example.com
        

Again, this configuration worked fine for everything EXCEPT that RichFaces JavaScript.

Since I am only using one node for 10MinuteMail, there is no real need for a load balancer configuration, so I replaced the configuration with this:

	ProxyPass /10MinuteMail http://127.0.0.1:8080/10MinuteMail
	ProxyPass /10MinuteMail/ http://127.0.0.1:8080/10MinuteMail/
        ProxyPassReverse /10MinuteMail/ http://127.0.0.1:8080/10MinuteMail/

Which works, and fixed the RichFaces reference.

So there’s your solution. However I have no idea what the actual root cause is.