JavaServer Faces has come a long way since its initial release. This is mostly due to the big ecosystem around it that allows many third-party add-ons to contribute. The first major extension was Facelets that removed the burden of JSP-based views.

With 2.0, Facelets became standard, and along with Facelets, many other features, including AJAX, originated from the community. JSF 2.2 followed the same approach and integrated various enhancements, such as HTML5-friendly markup, resource library contracts, and Faces Flows. Considering the current landspace of modern web application development, a server-side component framework such as JSF is still a popular choice among Java developers; this is because JSF is flexible enough to keep up.

I started PrimeFaces back in 2009 to provide a new alternative component suite to the JSF ecosystem. As of now, PrimeFaces is the most popular framework and the de facto standard for JSF applications built with Java EE. During this time, the component suite has extended to an over-100-rich suite of components utilizing modern JavaScript and CSS techniques, integrating responsive design, and providing mobile and push modules.

PrimeFaces is documented well in PrimeFaces User Guide, and Showcase is considered to be a practical guide in itself. However, there are many cases that can only be seen when doing actual development and are not to be found in the guide or Showcase. PrimeFaces Cookbook, Second Edition, focuses on these cases in a practical way to provide best practices as solutions to common requirements.

I've known Mert and Oleg for a long time; both are power users of PrimeFaces and longtime contributors to the framework. Their expertise in PrimeFaces makes this book a great complementary resource when developing applications with PrimeFaces.

Çağatay Çivici

Founder and Lead Developer of PrimeFaces