As you've probably noticed, we've been busy over the last month preparing the Seam 2.1.0 release - and I'm pleased to say that it's here at last! Some of the highlights from Seam 2.1.0 include an identity management framework with ACL style permissions, an Excel reporting module, an embellished and more flexible seam-gen, first class support for Wicket, built-in support for URL rewriting and a technology preview of JAX-RS (REST) support through the RESTeasy project.
We've also made numerous improvements to Seam core to make your life with Seam easier - support for rendering JSF components in mail templates when sending mail from an asynchronous method, support for JBoss Cache 2 and EHCache as well as JBoss Cache, faster SeamTest and better handling of concurrent requests to conversations. We've also kept track with JBoss AS 5, increasing the number of examples that work; as always, you can deploy your Seam appliction to most major containers. Check out the Seam reference guide to find more comprehensive documentation for deploying to WebLogic, WebSphere, OC4J and now Glassfish. Seam integrates with a huge number of other libraries and frameworks, and Seam 2.1.0 updates these to their latest versions, such as RichFaces 3.2 and Groovy 1.5.
JBoss has always been committed to open standards - bringing our experience with Hibernate to JPA and participating actively in many JCP (and other) standards bodies. And that is why we took many of the ideas and concepts in Seam and sought to standardize them by leading the Web Beans specification. Speaking of which, work on the Web Beans RI is well underway, and the public draft should be published soon...
Next up, Seam 2.1.1! We'll be focusing on performance, scalability and clustering; Jay and Shane have already made a great start on scalability analysis, which has resulted in a 12-17% increase in performance under load. Watch this space for more analysis and results! Seam has always been focused on helping you cross the bridge to new technologies and architectures. That's why Marek and Dan will be working closely with the JBoss Clustering team; their aim is two-fold, to increase your understanding of how to use Seam in a cluster through documentation and examples and to improve entity-replication. I think Norman is even planning to slip in OpenID support :-) We're expecting to have a pretty quick turnaround for this one!
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Sounds great! I understand that WebBeans doesn't have some Seam features like security, PDF, email, etc. I'm wondering if WebBeans RI will be stripped of anything not in the spec, or will future releases of Seam be usable as WebBeans RI? I am wondering if when I use GlassFish V3 with Java EE 6, will I be replacing the built in WebBeans implementation with Seam 3.0 jar files in my project to get the extra functionality, or will the extra functionality be split out and I can add just the bits I need into my app without replacing WebBeans RI? Hopefully that doesn't sound too confusing.
Please read How does Seam relate to Web Beans?
Back in May, the following was posted here
I can't find anything related to OpenID in the document. What's the status of OpenID?
The Best of the Best is the first class support for Wicket. I applaud for this effort because really Seam is a great framework but JSF sometimes sucks and Wicket is the right framework to replace JSF.
Regards.
Yay for Glassfish. I'd really like to see Glassfish support as a first class citizen for you guys - are you planning that? I'm loving Seam, but I'd really like to see Red Hat move away from JBoss, it's way behind the market at this point.
Thanks but I already did read that and it does not answer the question I asked. When GlassFish V3 has WebBeans RI built in and I want to use extra functionality in Seam, am I going to have to include the entire Seam framework in my .war file? Or will Seam be split up so I can add Seam framework extras to my project without duplicating .jar files that already exist in WebBeans RI?
You can think of it as renaming jboss-seam.jar to web-beans.jar. And if that one is already on the AS classpath, you don't need to add it. So as I see it, the core stuff (injection etc) will be split into the web beans part and Seam 3 will add to that.
a big THANK YOU and keep up the good work!
Christos
Wow,really amazing build. Congrats to all Seam core developers, you are raising the bar so high :)
Thanks for this big release.
I'm a bit concerned by this mail issue in 2.1.0. If I upgrade my application with Seam Mail in them to 2.1.0 will they work ?
We haven't finalised packaging for Seam 3 yet :-) We'll keep this comment in mind.
As I mentioned above, OpenID support will be included in 2.1.1 - we decided to press ahead with the 2.1.0 release despite not having OpenID support as there was just so much done already. Norman will be posting more on mailto:seam-dev(AT)lists.jboss.org soon about OpenID I think...
Seam mail works as always in Seam 2.1.0 if you send the mail from a JSF request. We improved the support for async sending (works great with the thread pool dispatcher), and support when using ICEFaces, but there is a proble with sending asynchronously when you use Quartz.
Congratulations to all the people involved in the effort!
That´s great! Congratulations to all the team. Go on this way!
Thank you very much, indeed!
I seriously doubt that Red Hat is going to move away from JBoss AS, considering the fact that JBoss is a division of Red Hat. However, the point you raise about JBoss AS being behind the market is being taken very seriously. JBoss AS 5 is out now and the team behind it is working very hard to catch up with the next version of the spec (EE 6).
Getting back to Seam, recall that the team is focused on providing a middleware framework for Java EE, not just JBoss AS. So you can be sure that support for all major application servers will continue to improve, including GlassFish. I am pushing hard to have GlassFish support in seam-gen out of the box in a future release of Seam. Keep your eye out for it.
Great job guys!!
One question, can I still use JBossTools 2.1.2.GA with this version? Is there some logic to the version numbers in the two projects regarding compability?
Best regards Stefan
No, there is nothing stopping you from using JBossTools 2.1.2.GA. Obviously, JBossTools isn't going to provide any sort of tooling support for a unique feature that was added in Seam 2.1, but you will still get to use everything that you were using previously. In short, there should be no conflicts. If so, as always, please file a JIRA.
Any idea when the artifacts will be in the JBoss Maven repository ?
Seems there is a issue. Jboss tools doesnt seem to recognize the seam 2.1 runtime in the new project wizard. I will investigate some moore. //Stefan
False alarm!
I didnt chosse the seam 2.0 technologhy preview option in the first page of the new project wizard. Still kinda weird, but now its working. //Stefan
Hi Pete,
Is it by design that ValueExpressionImplementation resolves input value with no relation to the type of the actual variable in the context? We are using NumberConverter to format and convert numeric inputs and it worked fine until we switched to JBoss EL. Now we get SEVERE: /temp/number-converter.seam 27,85 value ...myBean.dblVar...: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: argument type mismatch exceptions all the way, because an input may be resolved either as Double or as Long regardless of the property type on our backing bean. Sun implementation always obeyed original property type.
Is it something that we don't get correctly?
Best regards, Andy Z. Toronto, ON.
I believe this was fixed for Seam 2.1.1.CR2 - please try it :-)