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Primefaces Theme development

Primefaces Theme development

By : Andy Bailey, Sudheer Jonna
Buy this Book
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Primefaces Theme development

Primefaces Theme development

By: Andy Bailey, Sudheer Jonna
Buy this Book

Overview of this book

Developing stunning themes for web applications has never been easier! PrimeFaces delivers a powerful set of features that enables JSF developers to create and customize awesome themes on the web. It is very easy to use because it comes as a single JAR file and requires no mandatory XML configuration. With more than 30 out-of-the-box themes, jQuery integration, a mobile UI toolkit, Ajax Push technology, and much more, PrimeFaces takes JSF application development to a whole new level! This book is a hands-on example-rich guide to creating and customizing PrimeFaces themes using available tools. Beginning with creating a JSF project and integrating the PrimeFaces library, this book will introduce you to the features of theme components, how these are structured, and how PrimeFaces uses JQuery UI to apply a theme to your application. You will learn to examine and change the CSS rules and get creative by setting standard icons and adding new icons to them. You will use a combination of JavaScript and CSS to enhance your application with help of scheduler component and go on to adapt and package your custom theme so that it is compatible with the Resource Manager. Finally, you will explore PrimeFaces mobile apps, ensuring themes are compatible with your mobile applications best practices for theme design.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
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Preface
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Preface
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What this book covers
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What you need for this book
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Who this book is for
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Conventions
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Reader feedback
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Customer support
Free Chapter
1
1. To Skin an App
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1. To Skin an App
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Why we need to create an app
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The PrimeFaces library
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Creating a NetBeans Maven JSF project
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Adding the PrimeFaces library and related dependencies to our project
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Building the project
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Running the project
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Summary
2
2. Introducing PrimeFaces Themes
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2. Introducing PrimeFaces Themes
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The difference between standard JSF and PrimeFaces components
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Adding additional PrimeFaces themes
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The PrimeFaces ThemeSwitcher component
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Creating the CurrentTheme Bean
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Extending the ThemeService Bean
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Creating a Facelets Template
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Creating a Mini Showcase page
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Adding buttons that change the theme without using ThemeSwitcher
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Summary
3
3. jQuery UI, ThemeRoller, and the Anatomy of a Theme
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3. jQuery UI, ThemeRoller, and the Anatomy of a Theme
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jQuery UI and its standard CSS rules
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The difference between a layout and the look and feel of UI components
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How PrimeFaces uses the jQuery UI CSS rules
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Changing the initial font and font size
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Creating a theme and downloading it
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Comparing our theme to a PrimeFaces one
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Packaging and adding our custom theme to the project
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Adding the new theme to the ThemeSwitcher class
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Summary
4
4. A PrimeFaces inputText Component in Detail
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4. A PrimeFaces inputText Component in Detail
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Creating a new JSF page and adding a standard inputText component
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Examining the UI element using the browser developer tool
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Adding a PrimeFaces inputText component to the page and comparing these two elements
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Turning a standard component into a PrimeFaces one
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Summary
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5. Let's Get Creative
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5. Let's Get Creative
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Creating a new JSF page
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Using your unpackaged theme and applying it to your application
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Changing the initial font and font size in your theme
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Changing the foreground and background colors
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Changing the highlighted, active, and selected CSS rules
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Changing the rounding rules
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Changing the shadow effects
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Changing the menu background
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Summary
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6. Icons
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6. Icons
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Introducing the standard theme icon set
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Creating a set of icons of our own
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Adding the new icons to your theme
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Using custom icons in the commandButton components
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Using custom icons in a menu component
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The Font Awesome icons as an alternative to the ThemeRoller icons
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Summary
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7. Dynamic Changes – a Working Example
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7. Dynamic Changes – a Working Example
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Introducing the schedule component
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A lack of skinning support for date and event selection
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Creating a CSS rule to set the background color in an HTML element
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Creating a JavaScript function to apply CSS rules to a specific HTML element
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Executing a client-side JavaScript function from the server-side – the power of AJAX and RequestContext
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8. Mobile Web Apps
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8. Mobile Web Apps
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The demand of creating a powerful mobile website
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Restrictions of real estate mobile device screens are simply smaller
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Introducing PrimeFaces Mobile for JSF-based applications
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The differences between PrimeFaces Mobile and normal PrimeFaces
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Creating customized mobile themes – the power of jQuery Mobile ThemeRoller
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Applying customized mobile themes to PrimeFaces Mobile
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Summary
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9. The Final Touches
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9. The Final Touches
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The PrimeFaces showcase
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See what you don’t like in the showcase and apply the changes
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See what you do like in the showcase and make everything look that way
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Do the changes same way for PrimeFaces Mobile
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Packaging your custom theme
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Creating CSS files that provide variations on a theme
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Summary
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10. Theme Design Best Practices
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10. Theme Design Best Practices
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Introduction of WAI for good web design
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Colors, icon sets, background, and foreground
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Fonts make the text stand out
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Rich Internet applications versus desktop applications
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Functions per page
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Components you will be using
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Some important PrimeFaces CSS classes
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Going beyond the standard PrimeFaces theme
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Override PrimeFaces CSS classes
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Override specific component CSS styles
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Preview the theme styles before going to use
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Considerations for mobile applications
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Busy UI versus data-dominated UI
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Feedback from potential users
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Miscellaneous best practices
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Summary
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11. Premium Themes and Layouts, and Third-party Converter Tools
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11. Premium Themes and Layouts, and Third-party Converter Tools
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Introducing premium themes and layouts
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Setting up and installing premium themes
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Using CSS Less support to customize CSS styles easily
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Brand new themes based on Google Material Design language
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A brief coverage of different premium themes and layouts features
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Third-party theme converters
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Summary
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Index
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Index

Preface

One of the most popular and commonly used web application frameworks today is JavaServer Faces (JSF) 2.2. Since the introduction of JSF 2, there are a plethora of component libraries that provide more functionality than that provided by standard JSF components. PrimeFaces is one of the leading component libraries available today.

PrimeFaces not only provides a rich set of UI components, but also has the concept of themes integrated from the beginning. PrimeFaces themes use jQuery UI as a foundation, which makes adapting to the existing or creating completely customized themes a gentle and rewarding process. Because jQuery UI is used to create themes, there is a plethora of documentation and tools available for you to use. This makes working with PrimeFaces themes very easy.

This book is aimed at the developers of Java Server Faces web applications; these applications use the PrimeFaces component library. Together, we are going to have a look at how to use built-in PrimeFaces themes, adjust these themes to fit a particular application's needs, and finally create custom themes for both desktop- and mobile-based web apps. By the time you have read this book and worked on the examples provided in its chapters, you will hopefully have gained valuable insights into the PrimeFaces technology, and especially into how PrimeFaces themes can be used to enrich user experience for your applications.

The practical exercises in the book can be run using any web server that supports JSF2/2.2 and Java 6+. The IDE used for the examples in the book was NetBeans 8.0.1, but any IDE that supports Maven and a suitable web/application server can be used in its place.

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