While looking for a suitable set of Open Source (OS) JSF components several years ago, I discovered PrimeFaces almost by accident. What I found was a link to the PrimeFaces showcase. I was immediately impressed by the number of components that it offered and the fact that skins or themes were supported out of the box. Also, PrimeFaces uses industry-standard libraries such as jQuery and jQuery UI to make things work well and look good too. Because PrimeFaces uses the JSF standard extension framework, there are no headaches involved in integrating it into new or existing projects. In addition to providing a set of JSF components, it also provides a complete set of data model classes to support the various data-oriented components and some very useful utility classes as well. Last, but not least, PrimeFaces offers WebSocket support by integrating the excellent Atmosphere WebSocket library.

PrimeFaces also has a very active forum community, where I am often found answering questions asked by users, and hopefully getting them right too.

The version of PrimeFaces that I first used was 2.2, and at the time of writing this book, PrimeFaces has reached release 5.2, with 5.3 in the pipeline. The team of developers has done a wonderful job providing us with, in my opinion, the best OS JSF component library out there. It is worth paying a visit to the showcase at http://www.primefaces.org/showcase/, especially now that it has had a face lift and the very capable components are shown off in all their glory.