PrimeFaces Book

I’d like to announce a change in PrimeFaces documentation. PrimeFaces User’s Guide will be renamed to PrimeFaces Book and be commercial to create financial resources for the project. The document is already 413 pages and we’ll enhance it with how-to guides and more to add even more value. Sale price of the book will be only 9.90 Euros. For minor releases/updates you can get the updated book without buying it again but for major releases (2.2 -> 2.3) purchase of new copy is necessary. So Why This Change?

Owner of PrimeFaces, Prime Technology, which I’ve co-founded is a startup company. As most of other startups resources aren’t something we have a lot. Still PrimeFaces managed to be the most popular component suite for JSF 2.0 (I think we’re doing a good job) even though our dedicated resources for PrimeFaces is only 20 dollars per month(hosting) compared to sponsored libraries like Oracle ADF Faces, or JBoss RichFaces. I assume their budget is more than 20 dollars and developers of these libraries are getting their regular paycheck at the end of the month.

PrimeFaces is not the only open source library that aims to create resources by selling documentation, examples I can think of are iText and JFreeChart. So in summary, we’re adopting the same model and starting with upcoming PrimeFaces Book that covers PrimeFaces 2.2 we’ll be applying this change. I think this is the only way to do it without damaging the open source nature of PrimeFaces as we’ll never change the license(Apache2) and close down the source. I hope PrimeFaces community will understand the necessity of this change and support the development of PrimeFaces by purchasing the PrimeFaces Book which is quite cheap(9.90 Euros) compared to a publisher book.