In Relation To

This morning I uploaded a GA release of Seam 1.1. For those who've been following the development of Seam 1.1, there is not much new in this compared to the two CR releases. The only significant improvements compared to CR2 are that we now have the Hibernate and JPA example applications running out of the box on WebLogic (as well as JBoss, GlassFish and Tomcat), a number of enhancements to seam-gen, and a nice built-in datepicker control.

Seam 1.1.0.CR2 fixes a number of minor bugs in the CR1 release, and adds some minor improvements. This release includes a version of the booking example application which deploys on GlassFish, the Java EE 5 reference implementation, along with the hibernate2 and jpa examples which run cross-platform on JBoss 4 (with or without EJB3), GlassFish and Tomcat out of the box, and which may be made to run on any J2EE 1.4 compliant application server. The ICEfaces example has been upgraded to ICEfaces 1.5.1.

InfoQ interviewed me on the subject of Seam 1.1. Check it out:

With the release of CR1, we are proud to announce Seam 1.1 to the world. Seam 1.1 brings Ajax, lightweight asynchronicity and the Seam Application Framework to Seam, and brings Seam to the J2EE platform. No matter what application server you use, you can experience the difference made by Seam's unique state and concurrency management architecture. This release is also a huge step forward in maturity, with many bugfixes and minor enhancements.

In the spirit of stages of grief, these are the stages of adoption of new software development techniques:

Norman Richards (super-smart/thoughtful guy doing product management stuff at JBoss) has posted a download of the Seam hands-on lab from JBoss World. This is a nice way to get started with Seam, and much more interesting than listening to me rant on about conversations and state management and unified component models for an hour and a half...

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.