Primefaces 3.5与4.0

Question

What are the major differences between primefaces version 3.5.x and 4.x besides the obvious java-ee-7 compliance in the 4.x versions? Has version 4.x been rewritten internally? If so what are the differences? I am currently using primefaces 3.5.20, so many of the new or updated components are already available. Has there been any work to streamline ajax throughput?

Answer 1

There are many improvements:

• The main one is the integration with jsf-2.2 specification. As JSF 2.2 is servlet 3.x compatible, the file upload system has changed in order to take advantage of servlet 3.x features and make it in html 5 way. It also includes support for HTML pass through attributes, included at JSF 2.2 and able to include non-JSF attributes at the rendered page.

• Client Side Validation Framework: I still have to try that, but one of the lacks of vanilla-plain JSF is the absence of client side validation. JSF is known for being a server side framework. However, sometimes client validation is also convenient in order to bring the end user a greater experience. Primefaces 4 is supposed to include that (in fact they've been working to adapt their aproach to HTML5 standards).

• Search expressions: Something in JSF that can puzzle you is searching the component ids at client side. JSF uses its own preffixed identifiers, so sometimes it is difficult to search for what you want. JSF 2.2 provides a set of keywords: "@this", "@form", "@all", "@none", in order to simplify what you want to make a reference to. In primefaces 4 apart from that, you've got @composite which resolves the closest CompositeComponent parent, @widgetVar(name) which resolves a component by its widgetVar and @child(index) which resolves the nth child.

• Lots of bug fixes and component improvements, some of them have been done in parallel with 3.5.x series.

About ajax perfomance, I know there have been some issues in concrete cases, but apart from fixing them and adding new capabilities to their jquery-ajax utilities, I'm not aware about more improvements.

See also:

• Primefaces 4 improvements

• Default text (placeholder) in InputText component

• Search expressions in PrimeFaces 4