It is with great pleasure that I’m going to review the Prime Faces Cookbook available at Packt bookstore.
Chapter 1 will give you an headstart of PrimeFaces, providing the details on the setup and configuration of PrimeFaces along with the basics of the PrimeFaces AJAX.Â
Chapter 2 introduces the PrimeFaces themes and the concepts involved. By the end of this chapter you will be to create your own site theme including some more advanced topics such as the two variants of the theme switcher—stateless versus stateful—finish this chapter.
Chapter 3 is dedicated to Inputs and Selects, showing how to work with the enhanced input and select components available in PrimeFaces.
Chapter 4 is about the rich set of Containers (Panel,Accordion, ScrollPanel, and TabView) which allow grouping of the JSF components.
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. Â
Chapter 6 discusses about the endless Menu variations, explains about several menu variations. PrimeFaces’. Readers will face a lot of recipes
that discuss the menus’ structure, configuration options, customizations, and integration with other components.
Chapter 7 discusses about common tasks to be done with Files and Images (uploading/downloading/image capturing, cropping, and more)
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Chapter 8 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. Â
Chapter 9 discusses about creating Charts and Maps, covering the ways to create visual charts with PrimeFaces’ extensive charting features, and create maps based on Google Maps.
Chapter 10 is the “hidden secret” box as it contains lots of miscellaneous recipes, covering AJAX tricks, periodic polling, focus handling, controlling form submission, and many other recipes which every developer will face when moving into a real world context.
At the end of it, I’m pretty satisfied with this book which is a perfect complimentary reading to the official, excellent, documentation; so no surprise that the guys at Packt arranged for a recipe cookbook instead of a standard development guide.
Being at odds with stylesheets, the chapter 2 was a Godsend for me and I really enjoyed creating nice sample skins. I was really satisfied with Chapter 5 which is about the heart of every web application: data visualization and iteration. My only little complain is that I wanted even more of it, maybe with some Java-based examples that render data columns/format dynamically. I did enjoyed a lot the drag and drop chapter -Chapter 8- and the Chapter 10 which brings it all together and explores advanced use cases. Â
So in my opinion this book is an excellent, practical, developer-friendly book which will help you to solve a lot of common pitfalls which are common to web developers. All the examples are easy to understand and well documented and in my opinion it is worth a place on the JSF-user book shelf.
You can read here an excerpt from the sample chapter, which is about Drag and Drop.
