In Relation To

What, you didn't think it was possible? Of course it is! Although the Seam development team encourages you to use Hibernate as the JPA provider, Seam is capable of working with any JPA provider. This entry will show you how.

The anticipated conclusion to my two part article on how to improve the performance of your JSF-based Seam application by two orders of magnitude is finally available at JSFCentral. I've also released the source code cited in the article.

Adding to the stockpile of features that I've packed into seam-gen in recent months, I just committed a new seam-gen command that generates a front-end to Seam's identity management API (JBSEAM-3717). Identity management is one of the most significant additions to Seam in the Seam 2 code base. But since its just set of framework classes, you need something to tie it into your application to truly appreciate (or even give notice to) its potential.

I finally got around to weaving my modifications for adding GlassFish support to seam-gen (documented here and here) into the Seam project (JBSEAM-1619). While working on integration the changes, I managed to close the few remaining gaps and also add support for JBoss AS 5!

I've had this idea for a while now about using XSDs in Facelets templates. I believe we should stop pretending that Facelets templates are XHTML documents and start treating them as unrestricted XML. This would give us the freedom to extend the XML dialect with XML Schema and take full advantage of the type enforcement, syntax recognition, and tooling support that XML Schema provides.

Prior to revision 2.0, the JavaServer Faces specification states that all dates and times should be treated as UTC, and rendered as UTC, unless a time zone is explicitly specified in the timeZone attribute of the <f:convertDateTime> converter tag. This is an extremely inconvenient default behavior. This open proposal, targeting the 2.1 release, extends the Locale configuration to accommodate a default time zone preference that is used by default when a date is rendered.

The first part of my new article, published today on JSFCentral, explains how you can increase the rendering performance of a data-driven, JSF-based Seam application by two orders of magnitude! The article originated out of a contract job I did over the summer (before joining Red Hat). I worked for a group of scientists to develop a data-driven application using Seam, JSF, and RichFaces. That means it comes straight to you from the real-world ;)

The Seam distribution includes a tool named seam-gen to help you get started quickly using Seam. The tool collects information from you about your project and then uses that information to create a project structure. It can also generate a CRUD application by reverse engineering your database schema and generate various forms of stub code. In this entry, you'll learn how to get the generated project setup in Eclipse so that you can leverage the available tooling.

Along with Seam 2.1 comes a handful of enhancements to seam-gen. These changes are a culmination of the mods I made to the seam-gen project that forms the basis of the sample code for Seam in Action. Perhaps after reading this entry, you'll conclude that the enhancements go well beyond modest.

Out of the box, seam-gen copies all the dependencies of Seam (and then some) into the lib directory of the generated project. The JAR files in that directory are then placed on the project's build path. While this approach gets you up and running quickly, it's probably not the best long-term strategy. It's difficult to determine which libraries your project actually depends on and which versions of those libraries are present. What you need is some sort of formal dependency management.