I guess I knew the difference, but right now I find myself confused. :P
Both of them seem to be do the same thing, except that partialSubmit is used on subm
The accepted answer isn't 100% correct for ADF. The partialTriggers attribute is involved in the lifecycle.
From Enabling Partial Page Rendering Declaratively
The
autoSubmitattribute on an input component and thepartialSubmitattribute on a command component are not the same thing. WhenpartialSubmitis set to true, then only the components that have values for theirpartialTriggersattribute will be processed through the lifecycle. TheautoSubmitattribute is used by input and select components to tell the framework to automatically do a form submit whenever the value changes. However, when a form is submitted and theautoSubmitattribute is set to true, a valueChangeEvent event is invoked, and the lifecycle runs only on the components marked as root components for that event, and their children. For more information, see Section 4.4, "Using the Optimized Lifecycle".