Enter The JBoss Matrix Where JBossians blog

You can't have missed the release of JBoss Seam 1.0.1, Gavin blogged about the release of the GA version as well as the 1.0.1 fixing some bugs. But just in case that you were out of Earth for the past two weeks, here are some links:

The press also picked up on that news, sometime presenting Seam as an Ajax framework (it is not, even though we provide a very convenient way to call Seam components remotely through 'Ajax') sometime presenting it right like here:

Success stories

But this is not the main reason for this blog entry. I am very thankful to the people who dared to designing their applications on JBoss Seam before the final release and had to go through the pain of internal changes, this is also the time to share with you two success stories that i hear of and can publicly talk about.

With no order of preference, i will start with Lexicon Genetics who won the JBoss World Innovation Award in the category "New Generation Technology", the application's goal was to manage hundred of thousands of mice and their semen. It was interesting to hear from Buckley Kohlhauff and Mark Ma how managing all those mice was a mission critical task and how automatic-replication of those animals can be a problem. I am also very glad to hear that to some extend our technology is being used by people who are looking for treatments for human disease.

The second story that i can publicly talk about is from the senior consultant Sebastien Guimont and the team he's in from Covansys, their application is about managing contracts to buy bulls and sell their semen ! Yes again, animal semen... Don't ask me why :) They mainly used the workspace management, jBPM workflow, remoting and localization components of Seam.

That said, i would enjoy hearing more stories about how you use Seam in your projects related to semen or not. Please email me at thomas.heute@jboss.com or use the forum.

Seam talks and reviewing

If you want a Seam presentation at a JBoss User Group or Java user Group let us know ! We can come if this is for a large audience or we can help you to do the presentation yourself. In the same direction, if you need reviews for articles or chapters of books concerning Seam e email me at let me know, we will be happy to make sure that no mistake is being printed out.

For francophones in Paris

To finish with, i will be presenting JBoss Seam (in French) at the Paris JBoss User Group next Wednesday (June 28th), i will be glad to meet you if you are around. I will share my time with Jean-Marie Lapeyre who will talk about the French online tax declaration system running on JBoss AS that just passed its highest load for this year.

Thomas Heute - JBoss Seam project leader

In case you were not around the forums or starring at the CVS commits for the last month you may have missed some of the new features implemented since the Beta 2 version. Let me summarize here the progress that has been made and that is available in the CVS. That said, i want to publicly thanks Shane Bryzak who really worked hard on the Ajax support and JMS support, not only he implemented the support itself but he also produced documentation and examples ! Thank you Shane. That said, we are always pleased to hear your feedback in the dedicated forum.
Seamlessly yours, ThomasH

I am just back from Javapolis, it was such a nice experience. I was there to do a talk about our so loved project JBoss Seam. It was amazing to see the 750 seats movie theater room full of people even more when we know that the talk was "competing" with Julien Viet's presentation about JBoss Portal. Anyway i am very thankful to the people who gave me 1 hour to explain them the main concepts of Seam.

Once the presentation was over, at the JBoss cocktail party i was also surprised how well the public was educated on Seam, it is probably due to the JavaNews magazine publishing my article.

The speaker dinner was quite interesting too, we just sat wherever we could and just by chance i was at the table with the Wicket, Webwork and RIFE guys, it was definitely the web framework table ! It is good to see that nobody felt like we were competitors, i really enjoyed their company.

The big news for me, was that Oracle decided to give away their ADF components to MyFaces. That is a great thing for MyFaces and us, now we are all waiting for a JSF 1.2 implementation ;)

I did not spend enough time to check around on other presentations but meeting people there was just great, Stephan Janssen the organizer of the event is really a nice guy and makes everything smooth for everybody. Well done the Javapolis team !

JBoss Seam is using lot of annotations and very few XML for reasons that i will explain here.

First i thought of calling this blog entry "annotations vs XML" but it isn't fair. It's not about who is the winner but when it is more appropriate plus it is often an endless question like "Linux vs Windows" or "XBox 360 vs PS3" (it is good to have both).

I love XML

Back in 2001 my first real job at NIST was helping with defining, then implementing a RI and finally start building a test framework for the registry and repository part of ebXML. ebXML is supposed to be adapted to work for any kind of business and we worked on two different demonstrations one for motherboard manufacturers repositories and one for e-Learning courses repositories. It made lot of sense to use XML as metadata for those things, XML is really cool, i can read and write it with any editor, i can parse it really easily with those libraries available out there. Most important i can add metadata about images and other binary documents since i am using an external file just referencing the embedded binary or filename.

For all those reasons XML was totally appropriate

Now i want to add metadata on a java source file.

Back to the old <not so> good time

Back in the old not so simple EJB*2* time, i had to write my java file, then go tweak a file which i never remembered the name and the syntax, even worse i had to switch file everytime i was writing a method and in Eclipse it's not as simple to switch file as in emacs ! I often messed up with method names, typos became nightmares, but here came XDoclet ! I don't have to write my classname and method names twice, i don't have to learn the XML syntax, i just have to go on the XDoclet website and look through the cheatsheets, thank you God Xdoclet, i don't have to maintain parallel files anymore and i save *a lot of time* thanks to you.

The drawback is that i had to learn that again to explain to JBoss students how to do the traditional way, when i explained XDoclet method afterward, i was about to get killed for not explaining that at first.

Now that Java imported the Xdoclet basic idea right into JSE 5 by using annotations (aka JSR 175) it is even easier.

There are now lot of things that i want to declare on my POJOs, not only what kind of beans they are but also their Seam name, i probably want to use Hibernate annotations to specify some validation and so on. I will loose time if i have to switch to an XML file specify the classname, the method name and the validation furthermore i will probably do typos and realize it on deployment time and finally if i change my method name, my IDE refactoring super-feature will or will not change it in the XML file.

It makes lot of sense to have an email validator on my email field, why would i declare this outside of my POJO. There is just no reason for that.

The only good point i see in this case for outside metadata is when you want to keep the same POJO for different clients and they have different requirements (and i know they all have) in terms of password and username length for example.

Conclusion, I love annotations even more

XML forces people to be aware of the connection between a class file and it's file descriptor and to keep them synchronized, while it looks like a little work it appears to be a big time consumer for most of us. In my opinion in a 1-1 relationship between a java class element and it's metadata, annotation is a much nicer way to achieve the goal of marking a method or a field.

Thomas Heute - JBoss Seam project leader

It is with lot of excitement and happiness that we released today the very first version of JBoss Seam. Seam is an application framework for Java EE 5. It unifies the component models of JSF and EJB 3.0, providing a streamlined programming model for web-based enterprise applications.

Seam also helps you integrate jBPM process definitions right into your application.

I have a lot of pointers for you since we worked hard on having documentation and examples ready at release date.

In the package, on top of the hotel booking example, we offer a simpler version representing the registration part of many web application, the hotel booking example using Hibernate instead of EJB and finally an example integrating a jBPM process definition.

Now if you want to discover Seam from us, Gavin King and I will present Seam at the JBoss World Barcelona event on October 10-12th

Many thanks to Jacob Hookom, project leader of Facelets and member of the JSF expert group for being the first contributor of Seam :)

Thomas Heute - JBoss Seam project leader