If you're evaluating PrimeFaces for your project this section can help you. Design of PrimeFaces is based on well defined goals and principles.

A Different Point of View

Prime Technology is not a software vendor but a software development house along with the consulting&training activities. A framework that's not even used by its own creators can easily miss vital points regarding usability and simplicity, a major difference compared to vendor products is that we use PrimeFaces in all of our clients' projects as the front end framework. This helps us to view the project from an application developer's point of view so that we can easily realize the missing features and quickly fix the bugs. This significantly differs PrimeFaces from other libraries.

Simplicity and Performance

PrimeFaces is a lightweight library, all decisions made are based on keeping PrimeFaces as lightweight as possible. Usually adding a third-party solution could bring a overhead however this is not the case with PrimeFaces. An example of this is the ajax integration. Compared to other libraries PrimeFaces avoids using JSF extensions such as custom ajax viewhandlers, statemanagers, navigationhandlers, servlet filters, html parsers, dom tree replication and more. There's only one phaselistener that provides the Ajax Features. As a result PrimeFaces keeps a little footprint, does much less computation, use less memory and be compatible with other libraries.

Ease of Use

Components in PrimeFaces are developed with a design principle which states that "A good UI component should hide complexity but keep the flexibility" while doing so.

Strong Community Feedback

PrimeFaces community continuously helps the development of PrimeFaces by providing feedback, new ideas, bug reports and patches.

This section contains testimonials from members of PrimeFaces Community. Please use the PrimeFaces support forum or Who Uses PrimeFaces wiki page if you want to add a testimonial as well.

James Khoo

Just want to say thanks on delivering the BEST JSF framework in the market (Comprehensive list of "usable components", well written JavaDoc, and good community support), For comparison, here my experience while on working with other JSF Frameworks. "Err..... Huh..?...How? How? How?"

Here my experience while working on PRIMEFACES" "Wow...Cool....Application delivered.."

Wagner Borges

In five years as an analyst programmer, only now can I ensure that I have a team motivated and productive. Our projects developed with JSF2 PrimeFaces and are delivered on time and on schedule. I'm really very pleased with this tool, which is why I'm looking to collaborate with the community through my blog quebrandoparadigmas.wordpress.com.

Gregory Cooper

PrimeFaces is great. It’s the first set of JSF components that I have actually liked. Before PrimeFaces, JSF was a technology that I would “have” to use at work. PrimeFaces is one of the few Java oriented technologies I would consider using ‘outside the day job’ for a web project so I’m really happy to see it working under google app engine. I am amazed how fast this component library is taking shape. I cannot say enough good things about it.

Prashant Maroli

We are in the process of building a state of art architecture framework that addresses a very complex and workflow intensive business processes for Financial Institutions. Our team took months to finalise on various frameworks and technologies for our architecture with lot of brain storming and arguments. The decision to finalise was a very difficult process. But surprisingly the team took just a week on finalising our presentation framework (We call it User experience) and it was unanimous with almost no protest from any corner. We had a score sheet based on various parameters and Primefaces scored consistently above 7 out of 10. No other JSF framework came anywhere near.

I would like to thank you for such a wonderful contribution to the community.

Chathura Asanga Kulasinghe

I'm working for an IT System development department(in house) of a commercial bank (rather mention as the leading bank with IT solutions for all the time and the best bank in Sri Lanka in 2009). We have developed most of our enterprise applications ourselves and the same technologies(EJB2,servlet,jsp) had been used for a long time and no one really needed to look in to any new technology or trends in IT and 'resistance to change' was taking place when I joined them. But after that I developed and enhanced existing applications using jquery,ajax etc. After that, we tested all the javascript libraries and web components including ASP.net components. Persuading them to move to JSF was a nightmare for me as no one was ready to learn new things, even though I compelled them to move with the trends in the industry. So I had to work a lot with JSF to do and show something nice, so that I could persuade them to use JSF+EJB3 etc.

Earlier days, I didn't know about Primefaces, and hence I tested Visual JSF(Woodstock which came with netbeans), then tested richfaces, then moved to ICE Faces... but what I noted is, Visual JSF components were very hard to use with CSS, richfaces was very slow, and the same result was given by ICE Faces even if it had a lot of components with Neteans IDE support.

So I really needed a component suite which is very easy to use, which is light weight and which never conflicts with other XHTML elements and their CSS styles such as 'position' attribute(Simply would mention as 'customizable'). at the same time I tested Javascript libraries ( Dojo, Scriptaculous, Some components of YUI, Jquery and extJS ). I noted that Jquery is more light weight and easily customizable and very easy to use. As a widget library YUI and ExtJS components were very beautiful, but those components are some what harder to use comparatively and create some overhead. But JQuery data table was not so good just like ExtJs or YUI data table, as JQuery data table crashes in IE when we loaded about 2000 records. It has a way to do serverside processing and paginations and other functions such as sorting, but it's a little hard and it's lacking user reference guides. Also number sorting with commas ( just like 2,380,890,900.67 ) have to be overwritten and it leads the developers do malicious coding due to lack of guidance.ExtJS is good but lacking skinning ability and makes the html output somewhat heavier. Eg: ExtJS 'button' with rounded corners is very beautiful, and it displays as the same in the IE as well, which JQuery button doesn't. But ExtJS button uses nested html table structure to hold each part of a button. So you can see that it obviously adds a lot of HTML tags instead of just a single input tag.

When we consider these kind of matters, I believe that PrimeFaces component library has been created with a set of selected best javascript components. Dialog, Tabs, Accordion etc from JQuery so that anyone can use the theme roller and more reliable YUI data table which doesn't crash easier and serverside processing is much more easier and well guided.Also they have integrated themeroller skinning with YUI compoents such as data table as well. Primefaces is Faster, Rich, Flexible, Easy to use & Lightweight!!! specially it's latest versions have become more light weight even if the number of components has been increased and it doesn't depend on much of other libraries.

In addition to these reasons, primefaces has made the things much more easier as it's a JSF component library. Developer needs to just add the Tag for each component & he should not worry about jQuery bindings(mostly on page load) even. Because the Ultimate Autobot does it himself without making the human being (the developer) tired of worried of those things.

Thanks to PrimeFaces, the web development has become more simpler & similar to desktop application development(Just like swing/Visual basic event bindings). However, Finally I could convince my team mates that we would save a lot of time on development if we moved to JSF, because of PrimeFaces. They saw themselves how primefaces components work fine and save development time! And now I'm willing to teach about primefaces to the university students who work with us (Industrial placement / Internship).

Without any argument, this is a Massive and awesome effort and a giant step towards the success of enterprise application development.

Specially, being so generous to give such an awesome suite of components for free & open source must be really appreciated and that's how "PrimeFaces" has become a leader of 'Autobots' who helps human beings, but not a 'Decepticon' who thinks about self benefit!

"Faces for Human beings"

Thanks a LOT!!!

Leonardo Machado Moreira

What a Great work, What a Great Framework. I think you already are the best JSF Framework.

Asermej

I found out about Primefaces by following some of the Seam guys on Twitter and I feel like I have found the hidden secret to web development. I am currently trying to start my own business collecting tuition for private schools and wanted to do it using JSF 2.0, on glassfish 3.0. I didn't want to wait for Icefaces 2.0 and Richfaces 4.0 and so I switched. I couldn't be more pleased! It seems something new is happening in primefaces all the time. I love the new theme styles, what a time saver. Primefaces has really set a new standard for JSF. I have used all three frameworks (Primefaces, Icefaces, and Richfaces) and Primefaces is the easiest, most feature complete framework available. Also, Cagatay Civici comes across as one of the most helpful and respectful people in the industry.

EXCELLENT WORK to you and your team and thank you!

Timotius Pamungkas

I've implement my first jsf project nearly a year ago, using Apache Trinidad. It's quite simple to learn if you are a JSF person. However, I found primefaces on this early year, try to create some pages and small apps. My conclusion? I'll reccomend primefaces compared to trinidad (or worse, Oracle ADF). It's easy, a lot components, the skin is very customizable (i'm not css developer), and fast.

What makes this PF is my best choice: the support forum and new release is very fast. Right now, trinidad for JSF 2 has not relase final version yet (still in alpha for months), but PF2 already on 2.1. On my first impression of Oracle ADF compared to PF (we are using Oracle products here): I won't pay Oracle for such heavy, inefficient JSF frameworks (although it has nice look and feel). Good work PrimeFaces Team!

Philippe Chaker

I think that PrimeFaces is the meeting of simplicity and performance. More over it's very, VERY EASY to learn (if you have already work on JSF).

The summary of PrimeFaces: Simplicity, Perfomance, Solid.

Graham Smith

After getting yet more excellent help with problems I was facing I though I would chip in with a few words about my experince with PrimeFaces. I'm fairly new to JSF2 and like a lot of people I tried to get RichFaces and IceFaces JSF2 components working but I found them to be difficult to install and fairly bug ridden.

PrimeFaces, on the other hand, was simple to get installed and working requiring little more than adding the library to the pom file (good to see a Maven repository). I started developing against PF version 2.0 but quickly moved onto SNAPSHOT releases and have been staying with the bleeding edge. Considering I've been working mostly with snapshot releases I can't believe how stable and bug free most of the compontents are. I've hit a few snags along the way, mostly where I didn't know what I was doing, but this forum has been very helpful and I've always had a resolution within a day or two. My thanks go particuarly to Cagatay who must work 24 hours a day!

The documentation is generally excellent. The PDF manual is normally bang up to date with the lastest build release or at least very close behind it. The compontent example site gives a good overview of all the widgets and clearly shows how they are used and for the most part with realistic example use cases.

All in all I would recommend PrimeFaces to anyone looking for a feature rich, stable JSF widget kit with an excellent community behind it.

Oleg Varaksin

I'm developing JSF 2 web applications since the first release of JSF 2. No component library was JSF 2 ready and I met PrimeFaces. Many libraries aren't still JSF 2 ready, but already a long time ago we could develop rich JSF 2 applications with PrimeFaces. I have realized successfully my first web application with PrimeFaces and started to develop the second one. This is an impressive and rapidly evolving component set and even more. Monthly there are new releases with new components and bugfixing. Do you know any other library with monthly release? No! New requirements are implemented very quickly. I have often experienced that new requirements were finished the very next day after our disscusion in the support forum. Do you know any other library with such support? No! I read before many documentations of other component libraries like RichFaces. It was not simple and cost much time. The reading of PrimeFaces' documentation is similar an exciting story. Do you know any other library you have fully understood after 2-3 hours reading? No! Simple the best. Thanks a lot for the fantastic stuff!

Dave Jarzabek

I have been working with JSF for a few years using JSF 1.2. When I first started to work with Ajax components, ICEfaces seemed like the best alternative. They had a comprehensive suite of components - basically redoing all the html components and adding some others. I was able to make my applications look pretty good to the end user.

Now, I have been asked to come up with a development tool set that is based on JSF2.0 and facelets, so I started looking. My development environment is NetBeans and I needed to come up with a suite of Ajax based components that is compatible with this environment. I chose the latest NetBeans enviornment - 6.9, even though it is in Beta release. Once I did that I needed to find an Ajax based component suite that was compatible with this environment. ICEfaces, RichFaces, and PrimeFaces seemed the logical candidates.

ICEfaces was the obvious first choice, but there is no NB6.9 implementation unless you want to make it yourself from scratch. There was no help from the forum, no tutorials or examples that were useful, and their JSF2.0 release is still in Alpha (maybe Beta by now).

I looked at RichFaces, but was not able to make it work - the setup was painful and their forum required more personal information than I thought necessary.

PrimeFaces was my third try. I downloaded a jar file, loaded it as a library, and I was able to go. That was amazing. Easy to install and a component suite that does pretty much everything I need. The documentation is comprehensive and the component showcase gives some pretty good examples to use as a starting point.

I got off to a pretty rocky start, but the forum was very helpful. The fact that Cagatay Civici spent the time to get a novice on board was really impressive. My history with forums is that they are hit and miss - lots of abstract answers, but few down-to-earth responses that actually address the problem.

I'm in the process of starting a completely new application and converting two existing applications. I'm still on the steep side of the learning curve for both PrimeFaces and JSF2.0, so these three applications will be the testing ground for me. I also have a couple of mobile applications that are on the horizon, so TouchFaces is sounds very attractive.

Here are a couple of points about PrimeFaces that I would like to make from my observations to date.

• Ease of implementation: Very easy. Much easier than RichFaces and ICEfaces (until they get a plugin).
• Component suite: Very comprehensive, it has as much any others (except Google Maps, but that is coming and there are alternatives in the mean time) plus a lot more.
• Graphics: Lots of pretty spiffy image components that no one else has - way ahead of anything else I have seen.
• Look and feel: Very nice - lots of slick effects that I have not seen in other component suites.
• Ease of use: Like anything there is a learning curve, but the documentation, examples and forum really help.
• TouchFaces: I haven't looked into this yet, but I have a couple mobile projects on the horizon and this looks like the best solution.
• Support: Very helpful forum - much better feedback than have been used to seeing.

All-in-all, PrimeFaces is a two thumbs-up in my book. Keep up the good work.

Yannick Majoros

I'm Yannick Majoros, from Belgium. I work for some university and for my own after hours. I'm using Primefaces 2.0.1 in 3 production projects, each used every day by multiple people. Simple, works great, no major issue, and nice components like schedule which I wasn't planning to use at first, but which definitively gives added value. Thanks for the good work,

Jean-Marc Collin

I'm working for building an AndroMDA cartridge based on Primefaces. AndroMDA is a powerfull tool generating code based on UML modelisation. See http://www.andromda.org for more information about AndroMDA. The first version of the cartridge is waiting for the last bugs to be corrected and then will be submitted to the AndroMDA team for integration in 3.4 version. Primefaces is the more simpliest and powerfull JSF component library I've tested and the first supporting JSF 2.0 without the need to rewrite your code. The Primefaces team is doing a amazing work...

George De La Torre

The biggest reason I haven't used JSF before was the dismal support for extensibility and third-party strategies. Now JSF 2.0 changes this, time to look at it again! Looks like PrimeFaces aims to make a difference from the other "lock-in" JSF tools. So, after my evaluation of IceFaces (used in previous project), RichFaces, OpenFaces, Vaadin, SmartGWT and DHX Ajax libs, Primefaces is the best so far.

Romain Rossi

We are using PrimeFaces since the JSF 2.0 support. It's a very good library: fast, robust and with a nice Ajax and JSF 2.0 integration.

Larsen Eirik Rosvold

Big government project in Norway is based on JSF and PrimeFaces because;

• IceFaces provided too little control
• RichFaces is too chatty
• Atmosphere is too low-level
• Other javascript client-side apis quickly becomes a mess together with JSF

Pierre Martin

Primefaces is a component library that is about to be a revolution in the next decade! I would use Primefaces over other libraries because of it's developement speed and the quality of the support. The Primefaces leads are giving answers clearly and quickly on every single post! I appreciate your good work guys!

Piotr Wieczorek

I am Piotr Wieczorek, developer in Comfortel Sp. z o.o, a polish telecomunication company. We use Primefaces in web projects, and i really think that Primefaces are worth to be interested in. Opensourced, lightweigth and really easy to use and modify.

Valentina Fabrizi

I'm Valentina Fabrizi, an italian java developer. I'm developing a web-app that manage the E-Procurement. I am working with PrimeFaces.The our web-app GUI has improved using PrimeFaces. I worked with some JSF implementation such as MyFaces 1.2.x with Tomahawk, Trinidad, Tobago, JQuery4Jsf but with PrimeFaces I founded the best way to implement the web-tier. Thanks a lot for your hard work PrimeFaces team!!!!

Jessica Milnes

I was giving a project and I had to do a file upload. I wanted to have a "pretty file upload". I spent some time reviewing the following, this is what I found;

Icefaces - Didn't have file upload working for JSF 2.0.

Richfaces - Did have JSF 2.0 support. I was able to download and run their example applications but it was so slow. Then when I tried to setup a base environment it never worked. I tried their support form and nobody was able to help. Then I thought - why would I want to run something that nobody helps me when I need it and it's slow, and heavy anyway?

Finally, found Primefaces, which is very easy to setup and get running. Also, if you have problem the user support is very good about getting back to you with answers to your questions (just be as detailed as possible)

Chris Alexander

I am very impressed by the quality and diversity of the JSF 1.2 component library (1.0 RC). I am currently developing a POC console application for management in an attempt to "move them into the future." As I, and hopefully my team, gain more familiarity with PrimeFaces, I hope to see us contributing to this OSS project along with taking out an Enterprise support contract. Excellent work PrimeFaces team and continued success!

Phil Haigh

The best thing about PrimeFaces is that it allows me to very quickly put together highly functional and visually impressive demo web sites and web applications. PrimeFaces contains rich components that have a highly abstracted programming model and sensible defaults, so building a good-looking, functional and dynamic UI is now a relatively trivial process.See whole testimonial at here.

Stephan Bardubitzki

I have serious interest in PrimeFaces for replacing Woodstock framework and in TouchFaces. So I have deployed the TouchFaces default.xhtml example to my app server and did some testing on real devices. An here are my results:

• IPhone - excellent as expected
• Android 1.6 and 2.0 - almost as good as on the IPhone
• Symbian S60 - almost as good as on the IPhone, however older versions seem to have some rending problems with borders
• BlackBerry OS 4.6 and 4.7 - the big disappointment, but definitely not PrimeFaces fault. To my knowledge BB OS v4.6+ browsers are based on WebKit but I tested four different devices no one could render a page, however, the browser capabilities lack far behind above mentioned platforms in general.
• The good news is Opera Mini 4 and 5 BETA - the test app rendered quite well except for some font and for navigation between views one needs to use the browsers back button. However, Opera Mini can be installed on BB devices and other platforms which have browsers not capable to render TouchFaces. I have done so on Nokia devices running Symbian S40 with good results.
• So far I didn't had a chance to test on Palm WebOS

So my conclusion is that TouchFaces has great potential on cell phone platforms and I'm going to convert some of my Java ME apps to TouchFaces which has fewer problems with device fragmentation and saves money on code signing. Finally, thanks to the PrimeFaces team for providing such an excellent JSF framework!

Daniel Grane

My name is Daniel Grané and I'm actually working for Accenture in Argentina and developing custom enterprise application for companies. I've started working with primefaces 2 months ago and I think is a really good framework to work with. So far, I've been using it for one of my private customers (the release of the product will be in two months) and I'm sure when I have the chance, I'll suggest to use primefaces for Accenture clients. Thanks a lot for the good work.

Dave Everson

While we use both RichFaces and PrimeFaces - we have been very impressed with PrimeFaces with regard to its functionality, simplicity, and support. We have been migrating our RichFaces components towards PrimeFaces. A case in point: RichText Editor. In the past we have been using RichFaces. We had a requirement that users upload images that could be inserted into the RichText Editor. We could never achieve this with RichFaces. With a few lines of JavaScript and PrimeFaces's RichText Editor we were able to accomplish this using PrimeFaces in a matter of a few hours. Impressive. We also had a feature request for the watermark component. It was implemented by the PrimeFaces team in a matter of days. Again, impressive! Keep up the awesome work!

Lance Dolan - Owner of Freelance Webs

PrimeFaces is so simple, intuitive and aimed directly at what developers need to have control over, I haven't used a tag library as comprehensive. Also I'm finding your tag-api docs very explicative, which makes a huge difference in the success of the library.

Colm Brady - Senior Developer

I am a senior developer for a New Zeland travel company. We are currently in the final stages of developing a UI using JSF and Primefaces. I would like to recommend Primefaces as a very capable and powerful component suite. We initially selected ICEFaces as the UI Component suite, but ran into problems with Performance (NO true partial submit, complete DOM re-rendering on every request) and were burdened by the complexity of ICEFaces (DOMServlet to limiting - did not play nice with other JSF tools or component suites (Orchestra Conversation state, Primefaces, etc...)) and the limited components and ack of client side controls. (I am not critising ICE Faces but for our requirements it was not a good fit) Our key requirements are:

• Scale: we need to support potientailly 100,000 users per day- our ajax request need to be minimal and response content must be optimised.
• Support client side validation: we need to be able to use other JSF libraries that can do client side validation to avoid server round trip. (Primefaces plays well with other JS suites)
• Stable components: we want to use "out of the box" components that are powerful and tried and tested.

Benefits of PrimeFaces for us.

• Based on Yahoo Script library and widgets = stable and inovative. Can write custom Yahoo script to enhance functionality.
• Easy to use JS API to fire Ajax events.
• Not constraining... does not insert intrusive HTML or change the HTML of our templates.
• Excellent calendar component.
• Good support on the forum from PrimeFaces team.

We are looking forward to the continuation and growth of the component suite.

Skillrack.com Team

PrimeFaces has almost closed the gap on the features provided (when compared to RichFaces). We are using Seam framework and to our surprise found integration of PrimeFaces with Seam to be effortless. PrimeFaces has always done a better job than the other alternate implementations (to name a few, FileUpload, Data Exporter).

As PrimeFaces has better performance than other implementations, we are planning a complete migration to PrimeFaces in 2 to 3 months (The reason : Using RichFaces in a normal page together demands atleast 15 plus js, css files which is a overkill as even when a fast browser like FireFox has to get it from local cache it takes a considerable amount of time).

Josivan Pereia de Souza - Professor at Facet Faculdades

After evaluation several frameworks like RichFaces, ZK, GWT my students have chosen PrimeFaces for their studies due to it's simplicity.

Julio Vergara

PrimeFaces is fast, responsive and well documented.

Bruno Delzant

I recommend PrimeFaces if you want to develop a pretty interface, AJAX, and integrating these smoothly without problems.

Timothy Yip

I've given JSF another go with PrimeFaces this time. It is quite amazing how some changes can make a framework much easier and nicer to use.