Cagatay Civici's Weblog

Last Post

cagataycivici — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 23:51:08 +0000

This is my last post on this blog, I’ll writing about PrimeFaces at the official blog from now on.

http://blog.primefaces.org

New Infrastructure for PrimeFaces.org

cagataycivici — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 06:48:42 +0000

Prime Teknoloji is making further investments in PrimeFaces.

Last week I’ve moved primefaces.org to it’s new home which hosts a much powerful hardware. Hopefully there won’t be outages anymore. To compare old host has 300mb of ram with 16gb hdd on a crappy processor with limited traffic, on the other new hardware is Intel i7 Quad Core, 8 GB DDR3 Ram with 1.5 TB hdd with unlimited traffic.

I can feel the how fast showcase performs, difference is significant.

Dialog Enhancements

cagataycivici — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 13:19:44 +0000

Dialog component has received major update for M3 and reimplemented as a native PrimeFaces widget. Old Dialog was based on jQuery UI’s dialog which was giving us and users some problems since it’s can’t be updated with ajax, uses a fixed 300px default width and more. New Dialog keeps all the features to be backward compatible and adds more;

Draggable
Resizable
Modal
Easy Positioning
Effects
Callbacks and Listeners
Minimizable – New!
Maximizable – New!
Lazy Content – New!
Header-Footer Facet – New!
Auto Width – New!
Can be updated with ajax – New!

Minimize/Maximize mimics the window options in a desktop environment and new dynamic mode is very useful to speed up page load time since dialog contents are loaded lazy before being shown for the first time.

See PrimeFaces Labs for the Beta Demos.

Next stop regarding new features is the new treeTable and then we’ll start with the maintenance/bug-fixes for M3 which is due end of August.

TabView Enhancements

cagataycivici — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 09:51:15 +0000

PrimeFaces TabView receives an update for 3.0.M3, there were two popular requests from PrimeFaces Community;

Dynamic number of tabs

There are cases where you can’t know the number of tabs to display, suppose you have a collection and you need a tab for each data. ui:repeat and c:forEach can’t help much here so we’ve added this as a built-in feature.

Demo of Dynamic Tabs

Closable Tabs

Just like browser tabs, a PrimeFaces tab can be closed, you just need to set closable option to true. There is also an optional tabClose ajax behavior provided as a callback similar to tabChange.

Demo of Closable Tabs

DataTable Column Resize Callback

cagataycivici — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 08:56:54 +0000

PrimeFaces is built around the following principle. “A good UI component should hide complexity and provide flexibility”. When complexity is hidden, it is easy to lose the flexibility since you as page author not in control. Callbacks are a great to provide flexibility, a case in point is column resizing.

Hide the Complexity

Just set resizableColumns attribute to true and voila! your columns are resizable.

Provide Flexibility

There is an optional ajax behavior called colResize that is triggered when a column is resized, this can be used to invoke a method with ColumnResizeEvent, update other components on page and more. Mainly to keep user’s preferences so next time they open the page, their column widths are restored. Note that a cookie is used by default to keep/restore column widths on page refresh but using colResize you can keep the widths wherever you want.

See the Labs Showcase to see this case in action.

PrimeFaces 3.0.M3 Trailer

cagataycivici — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 20:03:22 +0000

Enjoy!

PrimeFaces Brings Excel to JSF

cagataycivici — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 10:50:14 +0000

New Component of PrimeFaces called Sheet brings excel to JavaServer Faces, it is a component that mimics the core functionality of spreadsheet desktop applications like excel and openoffice. Notable features are;

Incell editing
Multiple selection support via meta/shift keys
Bulk Updating
Frozen headers
Vertical/Horizontal Scrolling
Global editor
Resizable Columns
Ajax Sorting
Keyboard navigation
Theme Aware

Beta Demos are available at PrimeFaces Labs. Note that sheet is designed to be a lightweight component, although we have plans to add new features like fx support, excel-odp export, a feature like multisheet is out of scope since it can be implemented by placing sheets inside tabview.

Always bet on PrimeFaces!

Enhanced DataTable Scrolling

cagataycivici — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 06:30:31 +0000

One of the most popular feature requests we get from PrimeFaces community is the horizontal scrolling for datatable to deal with many columns, before 3.0.M3 we had vertical scrolling and now we have x, y and xy scrolling;

Implementing this is quite easy, you just need to;

Set scrollable option to true in datatable
Provide fixed widths to your columns
Use scrollHeight/scrollWidth in pixels to specify which type of scrolling you want

And then we deal with the complexity as usual Next step is frozen columns for horizontal scrolling but that’s planned for a future milestone.

Check out the PrimeFaces Labs to see enhanced scrolling in action.

Be involved in the Spring ROO PrimeFaces add-on

cagataycivici — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 12:19:26 +0000

Spring ROO – PrimeFaces Add-On is progressing but help is needed! Attached is the message from Spring Roo Lead Alan Stewart;

The Spring Roo team have started an exciting new add-on to create Roo applications with a PrimeFaces UI. We want to harness the power of PrimeFaces and JSF 2 to bring Roo users a rich UI experience like never before. As such I want to know if any enthusiastic PrimeFaces developer would like to get involved.

If you have used Spring Roo before, you will know that it comes with a few sample applications that have a Spring MVC web front-end. We have a working PrimeFaces prototype of one of the sample applications called Vote, however it is done using JSF and PrimeFaces tags. Before the add-on can be written to code-generate a JSF UI, we first need someone to volunteer their time to convert this app to render the majority of the components using the PrimeFaces/JSF 2 API. This has proven to be a time-consuming task as lots more Java code needs to be written to render the pages than just using tags. Also, I’m sure there are many more experienced PrimesFaces/JSF developers out there than I am and using best practices will ensure the success of the add-on.

Interested in helping out? If so, send me an email at stewarta at vmware dot com and I can give you more details.

Cheers
Alan Stewart
Project Lead
Spring Roo

PrimeFaces Team will be working as an advisor in the development of the add-on with the Spring Roo Team and the volunteers as well. See PrimeFaces forum to follow the discussion.

Let’s all make this add-on a success!

New Timeline

cagataycivici — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 07:02:13 +0000

Timeline is a new data component to display temporal information. Component is backed by a model and features zooming as well.

See the beta demos at PrimeFaces Labs.