In Relation To

The 1.1 release involved a lot of hard work in the guts of Seam, refactoring and fixing bugs, and working with tricky code that handles concerns like clustering and concurrency. Sure, there are many new features, but a lot of the real work is less user-visible. Now that this hard stuff is out of the way, it lets us add some interesting new stuff pretty quickly. Here's a quick roadmap for the next few months:

Cool: Seam was downloaded more than one thousand times on December 14.

In the announcement I neglected to give credit to all the people who worked on Seam 1.1 , so I'll take care of that now. Many thanks 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).