What this book covers

Chapter 1, To Skin an App, covers how to create a JSF project and integrate the PrimeFaces library into it. The chapter is meant to bring all the readers onto a level playing field and provide a platform from which both the book and a PrimeFaces theme can be built.

Chapter 2, Introducing PrimeFaces Themes, compares the standard JSF and PrimeFaces components and highlights that JSF does not provide for theming by itself, but it does provide mechanisms to extend the capabilities of the framework to include themes and a rich set of components.

Chapter 3, jQuery UI, ThemeRoller, and the Anatomy of a Theme, explains how at theme is structured and how PrimeFaces uses jQuery UI to apply a theme to your application.

Chapter 4, A PrimeFaces inputText Component in Detail, takes a simple UI component and uses browser developer tools to examine and change the CSS rules applied to it. In this chapter, we will strip away some of the mysteries involved in applying a Theme to your application.

Chapter 5, Let's Get Creative, builds on the work in the previous chapter by using a custom theme and tweaking it according to our needs. This will expose some of the weaknesses of ThemeRoller-generated themes and how to compensate for them.

Chapter 6, Icons, explains the role of icons in the PrimeFaces web application by using icons from the standard theme icon set, creating custom icons, and applying them on some PrimeFaces components for demonstration purposes. This chapter also introduces the Font Awesome icons apart from the regular ThemeRoller icons.

Chapter 7, Dynamic Changes – a Working Example, explores how to use a combination of JavaScript and CSS to enhance an application. Themes can only do so much and quite often, we want to enhance the way a PrimeFaces component looks like depending on the state of the underlying data.

Chapter 8, Mobile Web Apps, talks about PrimeFaces Mobile and how to create customized mobile themes using ThemeRoller and apply a customized mobile theme that is suitable for mobile web applications.

Chapter 9, The Final Touches, explains how to make sure that the newly created desktop/mobile theme is complete by applying it to the PrimeFaces showcase application and performing the common component-specific CSS modifications to finalize the theme JAR files according to users' interests.

Chapter 10, Theme Design Best Practices, looks at best practices in theme development. We will also look at generally applicable best practices in web design as well as those for rich Internet applications and PrimeFaces themes.

Chapter 11, Premium Themes and Layouts, and Third-party Converter Tools, explores the usage of premium themes and layouts and how modern technologies such as LESS CSS Preprocessor, the Google Material Design language, and so on, introduced in them to provide amazing templates. This chapter also introduces third-party theme converter tools that are available in the market.