Seam + JSF + EJB3 + GWT example application

[robjellinghaus]

http://unrealities.com/gwtjsf/20070427

It is still very unpolished, but the basic pieces are all there and reasonably well assembled. It may now be of interest to anyone working with a similar technology stack.

Included is:

- Seam 1.2.0 + JSF 1.2

- GWT 1.4 preview build (actually, a slightly earlier SVN build)

- My patches to the Ajax4JSF G4JSF integration project, to allow JSF integration with GWT 1.4

- Seam integration to allow GWT components to invoke service interfaces on Seam components

- A Java 1.4 DTO bean generator to work around GWT's Java 5 incompatibility

There is more to do:

- I will be adding a rich-text editing and tree-view browsing interface to the demo.

- Once GWT 1.4 final version ships, I will be landing my G4JSF changes in the Ajax4JSF Subversion tree.

- Once I land the G4JSF changes, I will be submitting this to the Seam distribution as an official example. Hopefully they will take it :-)

All comments very welcome.
Cheers!
Rob
rjellinghaus at gmail dot com

[robjellinghaus]

This has been updated, and the demo is now a lot nicer:

http://unrealities.com/gwtjsf/20070501

There is also an explanatory article:

http://unrealities.com/gwtjsf/20070501/article_0.2.html

All comments welcome :-)
Cheers!
Rob

[tzman]

Will these examples run under JBoss? I had a few problems deploying them, after a little googleing I found some comments about some incompatibilities.

If it isn't anything you have heard of I can look into it a bit more.

[dxxvi]

Just my curiosity: what is the point of using GWT with the combination of (Seam + JSF)?

I looked at the Kitchen Sink application and it seems to me that I have all those components / widgets in JSF / RichFaces / Ajax4jsf (except the vertical tab bar :) ).

To me (maybe I'm totally wrong), using GWT is like writing a web application using only JSP pages where methods of various objects are called to do the business logic (i.e. it's not a MVC model). Do you think the same as I do or I am wrong here?

[robjellinghaus]

I just tried replying to this, but got bitten by login issues. My apologies if you see this twice.

tzman: yes, this does not yet build under JBoss. I was planning to wait for the release of Seam 1.3 before tackling the JBoss issues, since Seam 1.3 will require JBoss 4.2RC which includes JSF 1.2 -- and the GWTJSF integration requires JSF 1.2.

dxxvi: Yes, I can well believe that the current demo includes no GWT widgets that are not already part of Ajax4JSF / RichFaces. It is very much a matter of taste which you use. I personally LOVE stepping through the Java debugger on the client side -- not to mention client-side code refactoring -- which is only possible with GWTJSF. But your mileage may vary. From my perspective. GWTJSF is a complete MVC app on the client side alone, with model-modification RPC calls going to and from the server.

Cheers!
Rob

[tzman]

We are not looking at GWT as a replacement for JSF + RichFaces + Ajax4Jsf. They are merely another set of components that can be plugged into a page. As Rob stated, having the ability to debug via Java is a nice advantage.