Seam 2.0 has been released

Seam 2.0 was released this week. JBoss Seam is a powerful new application framework for building next generation Web 2.0 applications by unifying and integrating technologies such as Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), Java Server Faces (JSF), Enterprise Java Beans (EJB3), Java Portlets and Business Process Management (BPM).

The Seam team put together a list of new features in Seam 2. Some of the highlights include:

* The Seam component model now supports web services, including direct support for conversational web services
* Seam components can now be written in Groovy
* New improved EL syntax
* Integration with Quartz, Hibernate Search and JFreeChart
* Support for JSF 1.2, as well as support for non-JSF environments like GWT
* Eclipse IDE support in the next release of JBossTools, including Seam project wizards, EL code completion, a visual JSF editor, hot deployment and test integration

Re: Seam 2.0 has been released

This is a great milestone release that come after more the 6 months of hard work, I know cause all this time I sticked with HEAD.
Congratulations Seam folks and keep on rocking!

remote EJB supported?

Does Seam 2.0 support remote EJB? Previous versions required the web components and EJB components to be collocated in order to participate as Seam components.

Does Seam 2.0 support independent J2EE modules deployment? Previous versions required all Seam components to be deployed in one single EAR, which is a serious restriction considering that many projects in an enterprise environment have independent SCM plans.

Cheers
Alain Hsiung
Ideartis

Re: remote EJB supported?

There is still no support for injection of remote objects via @In, if that is what you mean. However, you can certainly inject remote objects via @EJB, and you can even have a Seam component that supports a remote interface. (In some earlier versions of Seam, a Seam component could not be invoked via RMI, but that is no longer the case.)

I think that covers most usecases - is there anything I'm missing?

By the way, the latest drafts of the Web Beans spec *do* support the idea of defining a contextually-bound remote interface object. So Seam will definitely get this functionality sometime :-)



You can certainly deploy Seam components into different EARs, but if you want them to be able to *interact* with each other, you're going to need to use @EJB, not @In.

There are definitely no "global" contexts that span multiple EARs (and I don't think there should be).

Share J2EE Library

Gavin, Weblogic 9.2 provide a tiny feature for developers to use syntax below
<library-ref>
<library-name>myLibrary</library-name>
<specification-version>2.0</specification-version>
<implementation-version>81Beta</implementation-version>
</library-ref>
in their deployment descriptor(weblogic.xml) to specify which J2EE library modules they use in their web application.

The "myLibrary" Library should deploy as a single share EAR in weblogic, once, so other web applications need not package them again and again.

It seems be very useful when we are using different collections of modules, eg, hibernate, strut, which has a lot of dependencies with different versions.

Is seam portable?

I am having big problems deploying a seam app onto Geronimo or Glassfish. It does not work or requires patches!!!!!!!!!!
Any comment?
Julien.

Seam + Tibco General Interface ?

Can anybody tell me if it would make sense to try to use Tibco General Interface with Seam?

Apparently somebody thought that GI and Spring Web Flow was a good enough idea to merit writing an article about it here: http://www.theserverside.com/tt/articles/article.tss?l=AjaxandSpring

Any other ideas on how to build a high-volume site without the usual horrible mix of Javascript hacks pasted into JSP?

Thanks,
Richard

Weblogic 10 / EJB3.0 support ?

Hi,

great news indeed and a big progress. Anyhow, working in a professional environment where one can not simply choose any app server but is tight to company strategies, Seam still suffers from missing Weblogic 10 support (using EJB3.0). I understood from variuos other threads that this might be a BEA issue rather than a seam one, but in the end it makes no difference for me. I'm pretty sure if Seam is supported in WL10 using EJB3.0/JPA that will double or triple the Seam downloads immediately.

Thanks.

Application Server support

Many big customers have proprietary license from IBM, BEA etc., which means that they must deploy applications only on their servers. So Seam team should invest sometime on application server support.

Meanwhile, really a best release from Seam team.
Congrats and thanks for their effort.

http://techieexchange.wordpress.com/

Oracle AS 10.1.3 support ?

Similarly I'm waiting for support for the current Oracle applicationserver (10.1.3).

Webservice: the other side of the moon

First of all congrats, seam is a great product on which I have based a b2b website with 15k paying user (I'm writing an article about) and two open source ws utility (I posted here about Lms and wise ).
Thanks because without seam they wouldn't be possible.



That's great. I think would be great to consider webservice client side too. I think a lot of user would appreciate seamgen would be able to generate ws stubs and a simple jsf client page, because IMHO in a SOA world also the client side of ws is becoming more important day by day.
Wise is a generic ws client based on seam and as said in this article I think its codebase could be used to extend semagen to integrate ws client generation.
If you would discuss about feel free to contact me at name.surname@javalinux.it

Re: Weblogic 10 / EJB3.0 support ?

Most of the core Seam developers are all long-time JBoss users. We've been doing our best support the major appservers, but we rely a lot on community involvement to make that support really mean something. To date, with got a lot of participation from Glassfish users, which is why that app server has the next best level of support. We do get occasional reports from websphere and weblogic users, but the level is significantly lower than for JBoss and Glassfish users. We're doing our best to support every appserver we can, but we need people using those appservers to get more involved.

Re: Is seam portable?

It is certainly not true that patches are required to run on GlassFish. The Seam distribution includes example applications that deploy on GlassFish and any other EE5-compliant application server.

If you're having problems, please come to the user forum and describe exactly the problem you're having, so that someone can help you find a solution.

Oh, and if you do, no need for the "!!!!!!!!!!" stuff, thanks.

Re: Seam 2.0 has been released

I'd love to see someone adapt Seam for use in rich clients. It would be cool to write a Swing or JavaFX rich client on top of Seam. With a Swing rich client, one could move some of the parts to the desktop side and save server resources (for example, a lot of the workflow and controller functionality could run on the desktop). Actually, to me, the ideal would be to have a rich client platform with an embedded DB that is automatically synchronized with the back end when an internet connection is available. This would not only allow most of the now server side code to run on the client side (workflow, controller, rules, validation, etc), but would also allow the rich client to transparently run in offline mode. At this point, the only thing the server is doing is merging deltas with the back end, sending deltas out to clients, the occasional conflict resolution, and coordination between clients.

Re: Oracle AS 10.1.3 support ?

As you probably know, OC4J 11 support is available out of the box, and documented here:

http://docs.jboss.com/seam/2.0.0.GA/reference/en/html/oc4j.html

With respect to OC4J 10, which is not a full EE5 environment, we know that other folks are successfully running Seam on OC4J 10, but without the EJB3 support. It looks to me like it should be possible to even get EJB3 support working on OC4J 10.

I suggest you post in the user forum, where there are more people with experience of the Oracle environment.

By the way, what we are doing for the next release is producing a set of guides showing how to deploy on each of the application servers. The guide for OC4J 11 (linked above) is the first one we did.

Cheers

Re: Weblogic 10 / EJB3.0 support ?

AFAIK, the situation today is that we have tested Seam (minus EJB3) on both WebLogic 9, and the Seam "JPA" and "Hibernate" examples demonstrate this out of the box. However, we did not yet find time to test it on WebLogic 10. We'll prioritize that now, I think it's important.

Re: Share J2EE Library

David, I don't think this would be implementable, since there's no way I could get access to the shared archive to scan it for annotated classes.

Re: Seam 2.0 has been released

This may be crazy, but if we're talking about rich client support: how about Flex2 support?

JAP and Hibernate might not be sufficient for WL10

Hi Gavin,

you are absolutely right - Seam works fine in WL9 using Hibernate. But actually people are moving towards Weblogic 10 just because of EJB30. My development team is very keen on using it and using hibernate in an EJB30 capable app server somehow sounds strange to everyone. And isn't EJB30 the selling argument for Seam ?
Again, from what I've understood so far is, that it might be an BEA problem (no support for varargs during EJB deployment, or something similar :-) - if this is agisnt the "standard" someone should open a case with BEA.

Thanks,

Joerg

Re: Weblogic 10 / EJB3.0 support ?

just let me know how to get involved and I'll give you as much support as I can :-)

Seam support on non-JBoss app servers

Hi Guys,

Since this question come up so much in every Seam related TSS thread, let me try to explain here ...

First, we try very hard to make Seam as generic as possible -- so it would not require JBoss AS to run. The proof of this effort is that Seam runs on plain Tomcat (using RESOURCE_LOCAL transactions). So, in theory, it should run on all application servers out there. However, since all Seam developers use JBoss AS on a daily basis (we happen to believe that JBoss AS is the best AS out there :)), it is natural that Seam is tested most extensively on JBoss AS. Also, as an open source project, we do not have access to commercial WLS, WAS, ORA licenses, and do not have access to their support. So, our testing on those servers is not very comprehensive. I have personally installed the trial versions of those servers multiple times since they expire all the time. It is extremely time consuming. ;)

So, the testing on commercial app servers is not very good at this moment. If you encounter issues with non-JBoss servers, raising them on the Seam forum is your best bet. Now here is a breakdown of what works and what not (to the best of my knowledge).

* Tomcat 5.5 and 6: Seam applications work out of the box on those servers if you use the RESOURCE_LOCAL transaction (see examples/jpa). You can use EJB3 features if you install JBoss Embeddable on top of Tomcat.

* Glassfish: Glassfish v2 is known to work with Seam (see examples/jee5 for an example). But we strongly recommend you use Hibernate as the JPA provider -- not the default TopLink.

* Oracle: Oracle 10 is known to work with Seam (see examples/jee5 and examples/jpa). Again, choose Hibernate as the JPA provider.

* WebLogic: WebLogic 9.2 and 10 can be made to work with JPA + JTA transaction (see examples/jpa). However, EJB3 on WLS 10 does not yet work. There is a reflection error from the EJB proxy the last time I checked.

* WebSphere: I think the examples/jpa can work against WAS 6.1.0.9. You do need to tweak stuff a lot to make JSF 1.2 and Facelets work on that server. We have not tried WebSphere EJB3. However, anything beyond a simple CRUD app might have problems on WAS. One of the reasons is that the IBM JVM5 has a bug that complains about unknown annotations (the correct way is to ignore unknown annotations as the Sun JVM does). Unless IBM fixes this, you will have problems running Seam on WAS.

So, that's it. If any of you can help us testing this stuff, please let us know! :)

cheers
Michael
http://www.michaelyuan.com/seam/

Re: Seam support on non-JBoss app servers

agree to all what you are saying - in addition to that I'd have the following comments :
1) the fact that those question show up all the time is clearly an evidence that there is a great demand of non-JBoss app server support. I'd therefore think putting this on top of the priority list (as suggested by Gavin) is reasonable. I'm pretty sure, if you'd announce Seam WL10 / EJB30 support in this forum you'll get in trouble with the download bandwith of your server hosting the Seam package :-)

2) as I tried to explain, not everyone has the choice to choose "the best app server" - whatever product that might be. If Seam wants to have a foot in the door of enterprise J2EE environments, support for the major commercial players here is substantial - if these are good products or not is a different question.

3) Hibernate is simply not enough anymore, in these "EJB30" days :-) Again, this is not a statement about the quality of this or that approach or a specific tool or package. Current situation in most companies is, if you say "i use the java core / mainstream" will get you the budget, but if you say "i will use a cool tool" probably raise some concerns. Take it as simple as this.

In german we say something similar like "at home, everyone can be a star" - but that somehow doesn't count in my company :-)

Thanks.

BTW : I even bought your book, even though WL10 is not fully supported. So now I have the book, I wait for the product :-)

Re: Seam 2.0 has been released

Congrats to the Seam team. Seam looks the way to go ... I can't wait to use it for jbilling. Yet, we need to finish migrating to JPA, and that won't happen until JBoss 5 is released.

Regards,

Paul Brenoir
Sr Developer
jbilling.com
The Enterprise Open Source Billing System

Re: Seam support on non-JBoss app servers

Just to clarify this: Seam2 works perfectly with TopLink as the JPA provider, I recently fixed a bug that was causing a problem with this combination.

Re: Seam support on non-JBoss app servers

Yes, we'll get it done.



Of course, it is definitely our goal to support all application servers.



Of course. See my post above, AFAIK, there is no problem running with other JPA providers.

Re: Seam support on non-JBoss app servers

A slight typo here - Seam 2 works on OC4J 11 (both EJB3 and JPA), and on OC4J 10 (JPA)

Is Seam to Solve Problem?

Is Seam meant to solve a problem which is quite frequent and not been solved by MVC and Injection Frameworks?

If so, What type of problems it solve.
We already have a bunch of Light Weight Frameworks like Spring,Hibernate.But Seam seems to be a heavyweight framework??

How relevant is it to the present world Mr.Johnson?

Re: Is Seam to Solve Problem?

In my opinion, Seam is used to solve problems which are already solved by Spring, Hibernate .... Seam does nothing new but brings you closer to the standards (EJB3, JSF, JPA, about web services, I don't know if Seam uses JAX-WS in JEE5 or something else) and Seam is thought to get you more productivity.

Re: Is seam portable?

Gavin,
I am going to give a shot to the 2.0-GA version of Seam and try and deploy it under Geronimo and Glassfish.
Sorry for the "!!!!"...
Julien.

Re: Is Seam to Solve Problem?

Seam is not by itself a MVC framework. It uses annotation for dependency injection and outjection (as opposed to XML). But there are other annotation-based DI frameworks as well. The value of Seam is that it integrates many different technologies in a seamless manner.

To give you an example: We all know that many web applications can really benefit from the use of a Business Process framework and a Rules frameworks. But in reality, few people use BPM/Rules frameworks in their app. They hardcode the business logic to Java code. Why? That is because integration is too hard. In fact, most people are still struggling to integrate MVC with ORM (no, it is not a solved problem in Spring -- you have to use OpenSessionInView to handle lazy loading at the web tier. But that brings in new problems). Seam makes web tier lazy loading automatic.

Seam makes it really easy to integrate other frameworks to your web app. So, you see people use jBPM, Drools, iText, Quartz, Groovy, and many other frameworks with Seam to improve their web apps.

If so, What type of problems it solve.
We already have a bunch of Light Weight Frameworks like Spring,Hibernate.But Seam seems to be a heavyweight framework??

How relevant is it to the present world Mr.Johnson?

Other examples of problems Seam solve:

* No programming in XML

* Build a web site that can work in multiple browser tabs.

* Build a shopping cart with working BACK button (even after you checkout)

* Build fancy Ajax web sites without writing Javascript (well, that is something JSF solves, but still it is provided in Seam)

* Build web sites that serve dynamic PDF documents

* etc etc

As for whether Seam is "lightweight", please define "lightweight". If we are talking about memory footprint here, Java servlet and JDBC are lightweight -- yet I do not see many people building apps directly on those technologies. If you are talking about "POJO component independent of framework", then Seam is at least as lightweight as Spring -- you can use Spring to wire together Seam POJOs.

Seam and Flex

Not crazy at all. I'm very interested in integrating the two, to the degree that I/we can in this version. I may be wrong but I don't think there is any "direct" support for Flex's RemoteObject, as this protocol is proprietary. That is to say, I don't think you can enter the Seam request lifecycle by invoking a Seam component using RemoteObject.

I can think of a couple different ways of getting around it, like using a thin layer between the target of RemoteObject and Seam components...something that looks like a business object but really uses Component.getInstance(seamObjectName) to get real Seam components.

That said, you could easily use Ajax and make use of Seam remoting, discussed in this thread:

http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&t=114080

I'm just ramping up on Flex (and Seam2) but I really want these two technologies to work together in the future, if they don't already.

Re: Is Seam to Solve Problem?

Yes, we started looking at web frameworks last year, with little experience with web development. After chugging through JSF, Spring, Spring web flow, Spring MVC, Struts and Webwork, and looking at Appfuse to generate apps and countless others, we settled on Seam before our heads blew up.

We wanted something that would work, that we could just fire up and start writing business code straight away. We didn't want to start worrying about Lazy initialization exceptions, we didn't want to worry about back buttons and multiple windows, maintaining state easily without worrying about the size of the session. We wanted to be able to include ajax if needed without having to go through the timely cost of doing it from scratch.
Thats the way most other programmers work with other languages. They fire up Delphi, or Visual Studio, or Visual Basic, start a new app, write some code, lay out some visual components and they are done. Thats the way software development should work and Seam gives you the ability to work that way.

To anyone who has used Delphi (and I'm a long time Delphi user) I can honestly say that with Seam, you will develop at the speed of Delphi except it is twice as pleasurable.
I have been very resistant to developing for the web instead favoring Win32 apps written in Delphi. It may seem quite dinosaur-ish, but I've been client/server for over 10 years using Delphi, the hassles involved in coding for the web just seems to be like coding with a nail through your groin. It's just so unnecessary, why go through all the pain when you can code for a platform that isn't so fickle.
With Seam, I actually enjoy developing for the web, and am quite looking forward to starting some new projects with it.