In this chapter, we have covered the difference between a layout and the look and feel of CSS. It is now clear as to why the separation of the two types of CSS is a good idea. We have also looked at jQuery UI ThemeRoller and used it to create our own theme. Having done this, we then used the OSnode (short for Open Source node) ThemeRoller in the PrimeFaces theme converter to create a PrimeFaces-ready theme. We have used Maven to add the new theme JAR to our local Maven repository and have then added it as a dependency to our project. We have tested the theme before adding it to the list of available themes in ThemeSwitcher.
In the next chapter, we will look in detail at how a theme actually works by comparing the HTML generated by a standard JSF inputText
component and a PrimeFaces inputText
component.