Book review: Facelets

Z Jacek Laskowski - Wiki Projektanta Java EE

Facelets by Robert Swarr (O'Reilly, March 2007)

I'd been reading another book about JSF advanced topics like developing custom components and renderers, and surprisingly easy got bored with the way it was written. Another day I looked at the books I kept on my list to read and Facelets by Robert Swarr drew my attention. It's a while since O'Reilly had sent me the PDF version of the book for review so with a project I'm about to be involved in that's going to use Facelets extensively there couldn't have been a better time to cross it out from the list. I knew Facelets a little and I have never read a book about it. All in all, I thought it'd be great to see what I didn't know about facelets while reading the book. And to be honest, it was the best decision I could make. The 100-page Facelets book by Robert Swarr presented Facelets so easy and in a very comprehensible way that it took me a couple of hours before I finished reading it. The samples mixed with their explanations made the reading very pleasant. I'm not good at reading books at such quick pace and can get easily bored, but the Facelets book turned out to be beyond my expectations - it attracted my attention and I simply couldn't stop reading it. It was awesome. The more I read the more I needed - not because it missed the topic, but because it presented it so well on a few pages. I marked a couple of sections to study again later that ensured I'm going to come back to the book soon. If I were asked what a book style and format should be Facelets by Robert Swarr from O'Reilly would be one of the books to match. It is just 100-page long, with enough examples and explanations, screenshots to visualise what they may look like in a browser so anybody from JSF novice to JSF guru should find some pages worth reading. I did!