Primefaces Theme development

Primefaces Theme development

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.

PrimeFaces Theme Development

Credits

About the Authors

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

To Skin an App

Why we need to create an app

The PrimeFaces library

Creating a NetBeans Maven JSF project

Adding the PrimeFaces library and related dependencies to our project

Building the project

Running the project

Summary

Introducing PrimeFaces Themes

The difference between standard JSF and PrimeFaces components

Adding additional PrimeFaces themes

The PrimeFaces ThemeSwitcher component

Creating the CurrentTheme Bean

Extending the ThemeService Bean

Creating a Facelets Template

Creating a Mini Showcase page

Adding buttons that change the theme without using ThemeSwitcher

Summary

jQuery UI, ThemeRoller, and the Anatomy of a Theme

jQuery UI and its standard CSS rules

The difference between a layout and the look and feel of UI components

How PrimeFaces uses the jQuery UI CSS rules

Changing the initial font and font size

Creating a theme and downloading it

Comparing our theme to a PrimeFaces one

Packaging and adding our custom theme to the project

Adding the new theme to the ThemeSwitcher class

Summary

A PrimeFaces inputText Component in Detail

Creating a new JSF page and adding a standard inputText component

Examining the UI element using the browser developer tool

Adding a PrimeFaces inputText component to the page and comparing these two elements

Turning a standard component into a PrimeFaces one

Summary

Let's Get Creative

Creating a new JSF page

Using your unpackaged theme and applying it to your application

Changing the initial font and font size in your theme

Changing the foreground and background colors

Changing the highlighted, active, and selected CSS rules

Changing the rounding rules

Changing the shadow effects

Changing the menu background

Summary

Icons

Introducing the standard theme icon set

Creating a set of icons of our own

Adding the new icons to your theme

Using custom icons in the commandButton components

Using custom icons in a menu component

The Font Awesome icons as an alternative to the ThemeRoller icons

Summary

Dynamic Changes – a Working Example

Introducing the schedule component

A lack of skinning support for date and event selection

Creating a CSS rule to set the background color in an HTML element

Creating a JavaScript function to apply CSS rules to a specific HTML element

Executing a client-side JavaScript function from the server-side – the power of AJAX and RequestContext

Summary

Mobile Web Apps

The demand of creating a powerful mobile website

Restrictions of real estate mobile device screens are simply smaller

Introducing PrimeFaces Mobile for JSF-based applications

The differences between PrimeFaces Mobile and normal PrimeFaces

Creating customized mobile themes – the power of jQuery Mobile ThemeRoller

Applying customized mobile themes to PrimeFaces Mobile

Summary

The Final Touches

The PrimeFaces showcase

See what you don’t like in the showcase and apply the changes

See what you do like in the showcase and make everything look that way

Do the changes same way for PrimeFaces Mobile

Packaging your custom theme

Creating CSS files that provide variations on a theme

Summary

Theme Design Best Practices

Introduction of WAI for good web design

Colors, icon sets, background, and foreground

Fonts make the text stand out

Rich Internet applications versus desktop applications

Functions per page

Components you will be using

Some important PrimeFaces CSS classes

Going beyond the standard PrimeFaces theme

Override PrimeFaces CSS classes

Override specific component CSS styles

Preview the theme styles before going to use

Considerations for mobile applications

Busy UI versus data-dominated UI

Feedback from potential users

Miscellaneous best practices

Summary

Premium Themes and Layouts, and Third-party Converter Tools

Introducing premium themes and layouts

Setting up and installing premium themes

Using CSS Less support to customize CSS styles easily

Brand new themes based on Google Material Design language

A brief coverage of different premium themes and layouts features

Third-party theme converters

Summary

Index

Customer Reviews

5 star

4 star

3 star

2 star

1 star

Creating a Mini Showcase page

In the following section, we will create pages with PrimeFaces components so that we can see how themes affect their look and feel. It is a mini showcase because we will not add every available PrimeFaces component.

Perform the following steps to create a Mini Showcase page:

Right-click on the chapter2 folder and move the mouse over New. Select the Facelets Template Client option and name it morecomponents.
Tip
For the book, we are developing a project that will be used to show off our own theme. This project is available in a GIT repository (see the Preface for the link). The file names that I used are those that I used in that project. You are of course free to choose your own filenames.
Choose chaptersTemplate as the page template and click on Finish.
Add an appropriate page title in the define name="title" tag. I used the following:
```
<ui:define name="title">
  A mini ShowCase of PrimeFaces components
</ui:define>
```
Then, add the following code in the content...

Primefaces Theme development

Primefaces Theme development

Overview of this book

Related Content you might be interested in

Current Title:

Primefaces Theme development

Creating a Mini Showcase page

Tip