Preface

PrimeFaces Cookbook is the first PrimeFaces book that provides a head start to its readers by covering all the knowledge needed for working with the PrimeFaces components in the real world. It's a quick, practical guide to learn PrimeFaces—the rapidly evolving, leading JSF component suite. It is written in a clear, comprehensible style and addresses a wide audience interested in modern, trend-setting Java or JEE web development.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Getting Started with PrimeFaces, provides details on the setup and configuration of PrimeFaces along with the basics of the PrimeFaces AJAX mechanism and the integration with other JSF component libraries. The goal of this chapter is to provide a sneak preview on some of the features of PrimeFaces, such as the AJAX processing mechanism and resource handling with internationalization and localization, along with the necessary steps to go through for implementing a simple web application powered by PrimeFaces, which will give a head start to the user.

Chapter 2, Theming Concept, introduces the PrimeFaces themes and the concepts involved. Readers will learn about the theming of PrimeFaces components. The difference between structural and skinning CSS, installing and customizing of PrimeFaces themes, along with creating new themes, will be detailed. Readers will also see how to adjust font family and font size throughout PrimeFaces components to provide a consistent look and feel. Discussion about two variants of the theme switcher—stateless versus stateful—finish this chapter.

Chapter 3, Enhanced Inputs and Selects, explains how to work with the input and select components available in PrimeFaces. Such components are the main parts of every web application. PrimeFaces provides nearly 25 components for data input, which extend standard corresponding JSF components with skinning capabilities and useful features such as user-friendly interfaces, AJAX interactions, and validation.

Chapter 4, Grouping Content with Panels, covers various container components such as Panel, Accordion, ScrollPanel, and TabView, which allow grouping of the JSF components. Various settings to configure panel components are detailed in this chapter.

Chapter 5, Data Iteration Components, covers the basic and advanced features to visualize data with data iteration components provided by PrimeFaces. Such data iteration components are, for instance, DataTable, Tree, and TreeTable. The discussed features include sorting, pagination, filtering, lazy loading, and single and multiple selections.

Chapter 6, Endless Menu Variations, explains about several menu variations. PrimeFaces' menus fulfill all major requirements. They come with various facets—static, dynamic, tiered, iPod-styled, and so on—and leave nothing to be desired. Readers will face a lot of recipes that discuss the menus' structure, configuration options, customizations, and integration with other components. At the end of this chapter, readers will know what kind of menu to choose and how to put it on a page for this or that use case.

Chapter 7, Working with Files and Images, provides ways of managing operations on files such as uploading and downloading, and image operations such as capturing, cropping, and comparing. Readers will learn basic as well as advanced configuration of components and use cases.

Chapter 8, Drag Me, Drop Me, explains how the drag-and-drop utilities in PrimeFaces allow you to create draggable and droppable user interfaces efficiently. They abstract developers from dealing with implementation details on the browser level. In this chapter, readers will learn about PrimeFaces' drag-and-drop utilities—Draggable and Droppable. AJAX-enhanced drag-and-drop and a special integration with data iteration components will be explained as well.

Chapter 9, Creating Charts and Maps, covers the ways to create visual charts with PrimeFaces' extensive charting features, and create maps based on Google Maps. PrimeFaces offers basic and advanced charting with its easy-to-use and user-friendly charting infrastructure. Throughout the chapter, mapping abilities such as drawing polylines, polygons, handling markers, and events are also covered.

Chapter 10, Miscellaneous, Advanced Use Cases, introduces more interesting features of the PrimeFaces library. You will learn about RequestContext—a helpful utility that allows marking components as updatable targets at runtime, adding AJAX callback parameters, and more. In this chapter, a number of real-world samples will also be developed—blocking UI during AJAX calls, periodic polling, focus handling, controlling form submission, and targetable messages, to name a few. Furthermore, after reading this chapter, readers will be aware of pitfalls of menus within layout units and nested panels.

Chapter 11, Writing Custom Components, explains the complete process of building reusable PrimeFaces components. First of all, readers will learn the component's structure and constituent parts. After that, a custom Layout component as an alternative implementation to the PrimeFaces one, will be developed. At the end of this chapter, readers will be equipped with necessary knowledge to be able to create different custom components for the next few JSF or web applications.

You can download this chapter from http://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/9281OS_Chapter_11_Writing_Custom_Components.

Chapter 12, PrimeFaces Extensions in Action, introduces PrimeFaces Extensions, a community-driven, open source project. The aim of this chapter is the presentation of some additional components, such as InputNumber, CodeMirror, DynaForm, and Timeline. This young project can spark interest in developing rich web applications.

You can download this chapter from http://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/9281OS_Chapter_12_PrimeFaces_Extensions_in_Action.

What you need for this book

PrimeFaces only requires Java 5+ runtime. With the help of the Maven tool, you can easily get the artifact for PrimeFaces library (for more information on installing Maven, visit http://maven.apache.org). Please note that Maven demands readers Java Development Kit is installed on your local environment instead of the Java Runtime Environment.

To get the Cookbook showcase up and running, you need to pull the source code with a Git client. The details on how to run the showcase web application in your local environment can be found on GitHub (https://github.com/ova2/primefaces-cookbook).

Who this book is for

This book is for everybody who would like to learn modern Java web development based on PrimeFaces and is looking for a quick introduction to this matter. Prerequisites for this book are basic JSF, jQuery, and CSS skills.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "For the first page, we also needed to provide the contentType parameter for f:view."

A block of code is set as follows:

<repository>
  <id>prime-repo</id>
  <name>PrimeFaces Maven Repository</name>
  <url>http://repository.primefaces.org</url>
</repository>

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

<p:contextMenu for="..." nodeType="...">
    <p:menuitem value="..." update="..."
        icon="..." oncomple="..."/>
</p:contextMenu>

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

-rw-r--r--   1 primeuser staff    834 May 21 16:45 log.roo
-rw-r--r--   1 primeuser staff  17650 May 21 16:45 pom.xml
drwxr-xr-x   3 primeuser staff    102 May 21 16:45 src

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "The add-on can be opened after its installation by navigating to Tools | Web Developer | Firebug."

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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