To celebrate the new release of JBoss Tools, I'm going to walk through some of the features of JBoss Tools that are interesting to Seam developers.

There are two perspectives that are of interest for people using Seam: the Seam perspective and the Hibernate perspective:

The Seam perspective features some very useful wizards in the New menu:

The first thing you'll want to do is create a Seam Web Project, by following the wizard:

Next, create a Seam Action:

All Seam components are easily accessible from the Seam Component View:

Even better, they're autocompleted whenever you start typing an EL expression:

Even property names are autocompleted (JBoss Tools is even smart enough to understand generic types!):

We can run our application from the Run menu, or from the Servers View. JBoss Tools automatically deploys changes incrementally, a /big/ improvement over the Ant-based solution used in seam-gen:

The most impressive feature of JBoss Tools is the visual page editor, which does a great job of previewing complex Facelets pages with RichFaces controls, standard JSF controls and even Facelets templating:

Of course, autocomplete and hyperlink/F3 navigation to Seam components and Seam component properties also works in the visual editor:

There is a visual editor for web.xml:

And one for components.xml:

Autocomplete and hyperlinking/F3 work here too:

If we use Seam Generate Entities, we can reverse engineer an application from a database schema, or from existing entities:

And, switching to the Hibernate Perspective, we can browse the entities via a treeview:

Or via a full visualization of the mapping:

InfoQ asked me a few questions about Seam 2.0 and Web Beans a few weeks back. They've just posted the article here.

Seam 2.0 was released this morning, after 8 months in development!

Aside from new features, I think the most important thing about the new release is simply that the codebase is /much/ cleaner. The migration to JSF 1.2 allowed us to solve many problems and remove quite a few hacks. We also repackaged built-in components according to a much more logical schema.

Actually, this release has been ready for a couple of weeks, but we held the release back to spend time on compatibility testing with the upcoming JBoss Tools release. As excited as I am to see Seam2 finally out there, the full impact of the work we've been doing in these eight months won't be seen until JBoss Tools is officially released. I've spent many hours testing the Seam2 support over the past month, and at this point I'm super-excited about the potential of this tooling to increase productivity another notch. I can't wait to get out there and demo this to people!

Please read Norman's announcement :-)

Seam and Drools both got the nod in InfoWorld's Best of Open Source awards. Apparently the judges did not have a category for application frameworks but they were so determined to reward Seam that they decided to hand us the application server category ;-)

The editors had this to say:

Although many pundits believe that simplification of enterprise Java via the heralded release of EJB 3.0 might lead the way to greater adoption, we think that lightweight, high-functionality frameworks such as JBoss Seam are an even more compelling driver. For this combination of functionality and elegant design, Seam gets our nod for the Bossie.

Thanks InfoWorld!

Three months to the day after the release of Seam 1.2.1, Seam2 has entered its beta phase. The Seam 2.0 codebase is more robust, better organized, better documented and is designed to take Seam beyond the world of JSF. Seam 2.0 introduces the following changes and new features:

• Seam WS allows Seam components to function as Web Service endpoints

• Seam components may now be writted in Groovy

• The Seam core is now independent of JSF

• Experimental support for the Google Web Toolkit

• Integration of Hibernate Search

• Introduction of JBoss EL, an extension to the Unified EL of Java EE 5

• Major enhancements to Seam Asynchronicity, including Quartz integration

• Major enhancements to jBPM integration

• Completely reorganized packaging of built-in components

• Migration to JSF 1.2

• Simplified configuration

• Support for pageflow composition

• Enhancements to the integration testing framework

• New transaction abstraction layer with support for non-JTA environments

• Enhanced JavaDoc

• Two new example applications

• Migration to the new Embedded JBoss

• Seam JSF controls reimplemented using Ajax4JSF CDK

• Many, many bugfixes

Many thanks to everyone who contibuted to this major release, and to the Seam community for your ongoing support, encouragement and enthusiasm.

Get it here:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=22866&package_id=163777&release_id=519157