In Relation To

The Web Beans JSR was approved unanimously by the JCP executive committee. You can read the proposal here:

The recently finalized Java EE 5 platform dramatically simplifies development of Java applications.

I've seen a couple of comments online to the effect that Seam is some kind of JBoss-only thing. This is not the case, Seam doesn't have any hard dependencies to anything other than the standard Java EE 5 APIs.

I, for one, welcome our new penguin overlords.

Recently, Simon Brown put together a set of requirements for a very simple blogger application that could be used to compare Java web frameworks. I have my reservations about the actual requirememts he put together (in particular, there is no form submission!) but since some other framework authors have bitten, I've gone ahead and ported the example to Seam. I want to put a massive caveat around this post: Seam is absolutely not designed for applications like blogs or web forums; these kind of problems are very easy to solve using something like PHP or Ruby on Rails and there is no really good reason to use Java for a problem like this (unless Java is all you know). We have a set of requirements here with /no conversations/ and /no business processes/, so all the sophisticated state management machinery of Seam is redundant. Nevertheless, frameworks need to make simple things easy, and you'll see how little Java code we need to write to solve this simple problem using Seam.

Thomas has posted a movie demonstrating the use of Hibernate Tools (part of JBoss IDE) to reverse engineer an entire runnable Seam application from an existing database.

Seam 1.0 beta 2 has been released:

Don't miss the Seam webinar on December 7 at 1PM EST. Enrol here .

Annotations are undoubtedly the coolest new thing in Java SE 5 and will deeply change the way we write Java code. In the process of designing EJB 3.0, Hibernate Validator and Seam, we've had a chance to really start to stretch the use of annotations to the limit. It's striking just how many kinds of things may be expressed more elegantly and efficiently in declarative mode when you have a facility for mixing declaration and logic into the same source file. We've seen that in practice, whatever initial misgivings people may have about Java annotations, once they actually start using something like EJB 3.0 in a real project, they experience such a productivity increase that they quickly become comfortable with the approach.

One of the distinctive features of Seam is that a lot more things are treated as components than what you might be used to from other architectures. In fact, pretty much every object you write will be treated as a Seam component.