In Relation To

Tomorrow (Wednesday) morning at 9:30, Bob Lee and I will talk about the work in progress on JSR-299. Over the last couple of months, we've been working with the rest of the Web Beans expert group to create a component model that combines the best of Seam, Juice, JSF and EJB 3.0. The end goal is the definitive programming model for business logic components in Java, combining Seam's state management with Guice's typesafety.

Over the last year or so, we've been thinking hard about what kind of new functionality we want to see in the next rev of the EE platform, and feeding our ideas to Sun to incorporate into the JSR proposals for the next round of EE specifications. These JSRs should become public fairly soon now, but I wanted to give a rundown on the things that are important to me, and why I think they're important. A lot of these items have come out of our experience with Seam, others have been things that have been missing from the platform for a long time. My wishlist is pretty long, so I'm going to spread it over several posts. First up, I'll talk about session beans.

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.

Wow, amazing how quickly my last blog entry got results! Since I posted it, it appears that Genuitec have decided to comply with the LGPL and provide their modifications to Hibernate tools in source form:

In an amazingly intemperate and irrational blog entry:

Exadel and JBoss are partnering to build a unified development environment for enterprise Java, comparable to Microsoft's .Net. Please read the announcement here:

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.

By the way, my favorite new Seam 1.2 feature is this one: