In Relation To

Usually I don't like to climb into these kind of discussions - I usually keep quiet unless I have something more to add than metoo. But forgive me for mentioning that, on balance, I agree with the many people arguing that bundling Derby in the JDK is a Bad Idea. My concern is that this decision naturally forces projects like Hibernate to have to support Derby, no matter what our better judgement as to the maturity/stability of the product at this stage. Perhaps if/when Derby has shown itself to be a truly production-ready platform, this decision could be better justified. But for now, Derby is neither usable in production, nor is it really a good choice for development (HSQL is much more usable at development time, and that is what 95% of people are using).

Last week thousands of people downloaded Seam 1.0 and tried it out. Inevitably, they picked up on a couple of bugs of the minorish variety. At the same time, I was getting some useful feedback from users who are already developing and/or deploying Seam applications at JBoss World. Finally, Roger Kitain from Sun reported a problem running Seam on GlassFish. So, I needed to do a 1.0.1 release:

Floyd provides an excellent summary of some of the key ideas on Seam based on an interview we did yesterday:

The Seam project is proud to announce the release of JBoss Seam 1.0 GA, an application framework for Java EE 5. Seam aims to be the most productive platform for development of enterprise and rich internet applications in any programming language.

The Web Beans JSR was approved unanimously by the JCP executive committee. You can read the proposal here:

The recently finalized Java EE 5 platform dramatically simplifies development of Java applications.

I've seen a couple of comments online to the effect that Seam is some kind of JBoss-only thing. This is not the case, Seam doesn't have any hard dependencies to anything other than the standard Java EE 5 APIs.

I, for one, welcome our new penguin overlords.

Recently, Simon Brown put together a set of requirements for a very simple blogger application that could be used to compare Java web frameworks. I have my reservations about the actual requirememts he put together (in particular, there is no form submission!) but since some other framework authors have bitten, I've gone ahead and ported the example to Seam. I want to put a massive caveat around this post: Seam is absolutely not designed for applications like blogs or web forums; these kind of problems are very easy to solve using something like PHP or Ruby on Rails and there is no really good reason to use Java for a problem like this (unless Java is all you know). We have a set of requirements here with /no conversations/ and /no business processes/, so all the sophisticated state management machinery of Seam is redundant. Nevertheless, frameworks need to make simple things easy, and you'll see how little Java code we need to write to solve this simple problem using Seam.

Thomas has posted a movie demonstrating the use of Hibernate Tools (part of JBoss IDE) to reverse engineer an entire runnable Seam application from an existing database.