In Relation To

It's fun to compare the historical download numbers of my new project with the last project I worked on . Until recently, they had been tracking pretty much level - Seam downloads had been growing slightly slower than Hibernate downloads did, about one month behind. But recently, the downloads jumped up, and Seam after 18 months is now where Hibernate was after almost 2 years. So, for now, we are doing better than Hibernate did.

Norman released 1.2.1 yesterday. Have you ever wished you could have the same edit/test cycle in Java that people in the PHP, Ruby or Grails communities take for granted? I mean, the ability to edit a Java class or XHTML page in your editor, and then see the result immediately, just by clicking refresh in your browser? Well, now you can. The easiest way to try out this new feature is to create a WAR project using seam-gen, and start coding - it's wicked fun.

This release was not meant to be such a big one. We had originally intended to call it 1.1.7, but when we sat down and looked at the size of the changelog since the 1.1.6 release, we realized that there were simply too many changes for a point release. So it got a very last minute rebranding ;-)

Seam 1.2 introduces many improvements including out of the box integration with the Spring Framework, EL support in HQL/EJB-QL, entity level security, SSL redirection, simplified configuration, improvements to orchestation via pages.xml and many enhancements to seam-gen, including support for composite keys and circular associations and integration of Ajax4JSF.

Seam 1.1.6 features several important bugfixes and new features for Seam/Security, including remember me functionality, integration of JCaptcha, support for automatic redirects to and from the login page when authorization checks fail and a minor API redesign. Seam's exception handling facility was totally redesigned, to be much more robust and work better with Seam/Security. Also, the seam-gen tool now integrates Seam/Security. This work was all based upon the huge volume of user feedback we received since the 1.1.5 release.

Seam 1.1.5, despite the strange version number, includes exciting new functionality including:

Micheal wrote an excellent overview of the new features in 1.1.5:

I just noticed that of the 1630 downloads of Seam since the release of 1.1.1 on Thursday, only 666 were of Seam 1.1.1. So I must have somehow fluffed the release announcement. (PST is a horrible timezone for announcing things.)

In Seam 1.1.1 a PDF view is just like any other page in the application: a facelets template containing EL expressions that bind values from the underlying Seam components onto the page. So if you already know Seam, producing PDF just involves learning the new iText-specific tags.