Prime Technology moved to clarify its plans for a new version of PrimeFaces Mobile amid strong reactions from mobile community members over its announced intent to develop its PrimeFaces application for the .NET environment. No stranger to controversy, Prime Technology was embroiled in a disagreement chronicled earlier this year in InfoQ about a competitor, Icesoft Technologies, forking from their PrimeFaces code.
Optimus Clarifies
Optimus Prime, Prime Technology’s online spokesperson, was quick to clear up any potential misunderstandings about its intentions. Optimus responded by posting a ‘Roadmap for PrimeFaces Mobile.’ The post explains that “PrimeFaces Mobile is a side project of PrimeFaces” and that the current version, 0.9.3, ‘never actually received’ so-called ‘Heavy PrimeFaces Development.’ Optimus stated that the ‘next version 1.0 will involve heavy development for sure.’ He listed in detail many of the planned new features for PrimeFaces Mobile 1.0; Growl-Messages, Dialogs, Calendar and more…
The self-proclaimed dominator of the Java Server Faces ecosystem was praised and also questioned about its plans to implement its core technology for ASP.NET. PrimeFaces community member Bogdan Marian said "Since I am a .NET and JEE developer, this news (the development of PrimeFaces.NET) couldn’t be more great for me!"
While community member httpeter said
I really don’t like this. PF was the opportunity to get Java back in the web technology business again. It’s like working for a non-profit organization and (to) suddenly start working for the arms industry. It simply doesn’t make any sense. Of course PF can make more money when working for Microsoft but I wouldn’t be proud to publish this news to an open-source community… I simply don’t get it.
Earlier explanations by Optimus indicated the precise plans for Prime Technology’s future workflow-
- Finish PrimeFaces 3.4.final
- Start PrimeFaces Mobile 1.0
- Focus on PrimeFaces.NET
Also describing themselves as a ‘Java EE and Agile Mentoring Powerhouse’, Prime Technology, state that the first version of PrimeFaces.NET will be released sometime before 2013. It will emphasize Web Forms and include a minimum of forty ASP.NET controls.
One member of the community, Makis said:
this is very good news, i was JEE developer , i moved on (to)ASP.NET , but just to (let you) know, start with MVC with(out) ‘Web Forms’ … web forms suck. MVC (Model View Controller & Razor) is much more better than web forms.
A community member Alexianon said:
I agree with you. Since I think it’s much better to spend time and effort on the MVC pattern of Asp.NET MVC4 instead of MVP of Asp.NET. But out there there’re still a lot of companies that still use Asp.NET for their web applications.
May I (advise) at least one thing? Please improve the Calendar, because the JQueryUI widget it’s quite poor, the Wijimo version is much better: http://wijmo.com/demo/explore/#calendar
In general, the community appeared to embrace the clarifications noted by Optimus in the Roadmap for PrimeFaces Mobile. Tim said: ‘It is great news that PF Mobile will be developed further!’
sudheer said: ‘Very Good news from PF Team .We are waiting for Primefaces Mobile 1.0 from long back, anyways great news for mobile app developers.’
While support for the Roadmap seemed to be universal amongst the community, also prevalent were suggestions for needed features that weren’t included. Here is the community’s wish list for PrimeFaces mobile 1.0 taken from the PrimeFaces site-
- Pagination
- Sorting features for data list
- Data table
- Autocomplete
- Enhanced Ajax(onstart,oncomplete, update)
- Live scroll for data list
- Twitter Bootstrap
- ThemeSwitcher for swatches
- better theme support across all components
- Popup panel
- Overlay panel
- Charts