2.2 Status

[cagatay.civici]

Dear all,

I'd like to give an update of 2.2 Status,

- There are currently a couple of pending issues related to datatable maintenance.
- We'll change the way themes are used as we can't maintain them properly, we need to do fixes and improve them but having unversioned zip files make it hard. They will now be bundled as jar instead, (e.g. primefaces-aristo-1.0.0.jar), properly versioned and configured in context-param via primefaces.SKIN or primefaces.THEME parameter. So you don't have to add the css link to your pages.
- Portlet support, we'll add support for portlets and create a kickstart sample for liferay.

Once these are done, 2.2 will be released, hopefully next week once QA is happy

User's Guide for 2.2 is completed and currently being reviewed for errata by a new member of PrimeFaces Team.

So in summary, we are working hard at the moment to provide a stable and high quality 2.2 before we start with 3.0.

Regards,

Cagatay Civici
PrimeFaces Lead

[MikeK]

Thank you for the update and all of the hard work. I am looking forward to giving 2.2 a try.

[cj91]

I Have one concern about the Primefaces and jarring the themes. We've used Themeroller with some degree of success to customize the look and feel our websites. Will jarring the themes break this functionality?

[cagatay.civici]

Have you created your own theme?

[cj91]

Yes we have; We've created several for us and our customers.

This is also a SAAS(Software as a Service) application, so we've advertised that with Themeroller, they would be able to easily blend this SAAS app into the their existing applications. Losing the Themeroller ability is a significant a loss for us, and IMHO the Primefaces community. It was honestly one of the reasons we chose Primefaces, so we'd be very sad to see it go.

[cj91]

Looking at my post, I sounded like a cry baby. I understand this is a difficult task, so I would like to know if there's anything we can do to help.

Since Primefaces pushes JQueryUI to the page, can you enumerate the problems you are having getting the jquery themes to work?

[MikeK]

I have also used Themeroller to create a custom theme. It would be disappointing to lose that capability. From looking at the default SAM theme it looks like it would be easy to modify the CSS or images in the jar with custom ones but maybe I am missing something.

[cagatay.civici]

Let me clear the misunderstanding here, ThemeRoller is not going anywhere, I think it is one of the best features of PrimeFaces.

We're just improving the way we use ThemeRoller, themes will now be in a jar like primefaces-aristo-1.0.0.jar, primefaces-rocket-1.1.jar, properly versioned and easy to maintain. We are adding a new themes project to our svn and work on them there instead of dealing with zip files of theme gallery. Also setting primefaces.SKIN to theme name will automatically include the theme css to the pages, in the past it requires manual addition.

The change is backward compatible, you can still set primefaces.SKIN parameter to none and include your css manually. Or even jar your own theme and plug-in to this new infrastructure, docs will be ready soon.

[Oleg]

Hello,

Hmm... I was not quite happy to read this because we have a theme war project where all relevant themes checked in. They are under version control. This theme web app is merged with other web apps during Maven build (war overlays). So, I didn't understand why we need jar files instead of war file. A war file is better because it can be easy merged with any other web app (Maven feature). For jar files we need to use #{resource[...]} syntax and that's problematic if you use yui-compressor plugin. Yui-compressor plugin adds ; to the #{resource[...]}, e.g.

Code: Select all

background: url(#{resource[...]};)

Web app is broken after that because FacesServlet can not handle that. Sorry, but it's really not good news. Can you maintain war files and not jars at least? The second question - how themes can be changed by user? We don't use ThemeRoller, current theme is a part of user settings and points to the folder where the theme is located.

Code: Select all

<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="#{userSettings.curTheme}/skin.css">

Theme changing reloads the entire web app and everything works fine. Will it be still possible?

[cagatay.civici]

Now themes are packaged as jar so we can do proper versioning like;

Code: Select all

<dependency>
            <groupId>org.primefaces.themes</groupId>
            <artifactId>aristo</artifactId>
            <version>${theme.version}</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.primefaces.themes</groupId>
            <artifactId>black-tie</artifactId>
            <version>${theme.version}</version>
        </dependency>

When theme.version property is changed, app should pick up the new theme. No need to manually add css file to the jsf pages with h:outputStylesheet or link tags as PrimeFaces will do that for you.

For multi theme projects following is possible;

Code: Select all

<context-param>
        <param-name>primefaces.THEME</param-name>
        <param-value>#{userPreferences.theme}</param-value>
    </context-param>

The themes we distribute should be compressed already.

Still you can forget all these new stuff, change is backward compatible, just set primefaces.THEME param to none and include the theme the way you like (war, jar, ...)

It is a matter of preference how you use the themes.