13 Replies Latest reply on Mar 7, 2006 6:11 PM by gavin.king

    some questions about SEAM , are not present in FAQ

      Hi
      Thank you for reading my post.
      I have some simple questions about SEAM.
      1-How does it compare to facelest in feature comparesion ?
      2-can i use it inside Tomcat , JAVA persistance API works in tomcat , does SEAM works in tomcat?
      3-can I use it to build jsr-168 portlets ?
      4-How does it faciliate a heavey database driven project implementation ?

      Thanks

        • 1. Re: some questions about SEAM , are not present in FAQ

          I'm not a Seam developer, but I think I can answer some of your questions.

          1. Facelets provides a JSF view layer UI substitue for JSP. Seam provides a lightweight convenience framework for working with and integrating JSF, EJB3, jBPM, Portals. You can certainly use Facelets with Seam (in fact the Seam developers recommend it), but it isn't required. Facelets mainly effects your JSF view layer and Seam focuses on the back end. There isn't much (if any) direct competition or integration between Seam and Facelets.

          2. Yes. I haven't tried the Seam examples on Tomcat, but as long as you're sure to also include things like myfaces and the EJB3 microcontainer you should be able to deploy Seam apps on Tomcat. As far as I know there are zero JBoss dependencies.

          3. Soon. The Seam developers are working right now on this functionality. I'd expect more examples and demos of portlets in the next couple months. The final 1.0 release will have this support.

          4. Hibernate/EJB3 do all the persistence heavy lifting. So your system will be at least as scaleable as these two technologies. Highly data driven projects sometimes suffer performance penalties because they don't take advantage of lazy loading and caching. They don't lazy load data because they've had problems getting it to work within their architecture. Seam provides the tight scoping and extented persistence architecture necessary to help developers avoid some of the problems they had with lazy loading in the past. Additional scopes and a good Stateful Session Bean implementation can also help a project perform better. These aren't really Seam features, although JBoss does provide an EJB3 microcontainer as a side product you can use with Seam.

          • 2. Re: some questions about SEAM , are not present in FAQ

            Thank you for fast reply.
            I really faced problem with jsf portlest.
            I still can not upload files insie my jsf portlets. so i should take care about using any frameowrks for next projects.

            By your answers , i still do not know whether beta 2 supports developing portlets or not.
            with a fast look at SEAM documentation i think it made the job very easy to complete.

            and one more , Does it provide a good integration with all myaces components like Tree and data tables ?

            • 3. Re: some questions about SEAM , are not present in FAQ

              I can't speak much about the upcoming portlet support.

              Seam does provide some enhanced support for JSF DataModels. This should help developers that do a lot of work with JSF DataTables.

              All the MyFaces components should still work fine with Seam. Seam only provides enhanced support for exporting DataModels at the moment. This benits all UIData components, including HtmlDataTable.

              I'm looking into adding enhanced support for SelectItems. Would enhanced support for UiSelectOne and UISelectMany components benefit you?

              • 4. Re: some questions about SEAM , are not present in FAQ

                Right now ,I am developing portlets using JSC , it create JSF portlets and all of its data binding is automatic. until now i have developed 4 portlets which contain about 120 jsf pages.

                After this long way i come to this idea that this kind of development does not scale well, my portlets that i developed using JSC will not scale until i change many of its charestics.
                I did some reaserch to find out what is new and more advanced to make web application and specially portlets using jsf.
                I find out that There are some but the best one available is SEAM , I tried to figure out whether i can use it for building next portlet or not by searching in the web , but it does not bring me any luck.

                so i come here to ask about :
                Whether i can use SEAM With all of its features like bindings , BPM ... in a jsf portlet (jsr-168) or not.


                about select one and select many , sure those will benefit every one who want to use Myfaces data table in its jobs.

                I am very optimistic with SEAM. hope it support Portlets right now and let me taste it in building portlets.


                • 5. Re: some questions about SEAM , are not present in FAQ
                  gavin.king

                  Good answers from CptnKirk, thanks.

                  Right now, you cannot build a JSR-168 portlet using Seam (well, not without pain). We are working on solving this issue right now, and this will be in the next release.

                  • 6. Re: some questions about SEAM , are not present in FAQ

                    Thank you very much , all of you provide answers that i was looking for .
                    I read in this forum that next release will be out after about 6 month , is it true ? (2006 , q3)

                    • 7. Re: some questions about SEAM , are not present in FAQ
                      gavin.king

                      Probably well before then. I'm thinking like 2 months, but no promises.

                      • 8. Re: some questions about SEAM , are not present in FAQ

                        It is very good new 2 month is not such a long time.
                        some more questions , I looked at the refrence guide pdf file , but still have some questions :

                        1-does final version fully integrate with myfaces components , specially data aware components ?

                        2-will it have some facilities for caching , or developer should manually add page or page part leve caching him/herself?

                        • 9. Re: some questions about SEAM , are not present in FAQ
                          gavin.king

                          (1) It should in principle be possible to use any custom component library with the current release of Seam (eg. the issue tracker example shows how to use Tomahawk components)

                          (2) Interesting question. I have not thought about how to do page-level caching, though this is more a JSF question than a Seam question. I should investigate whether it is possible to use something like OSCache with JSF. I don't know the answer at this stage.

                          • 10. Re: some questions about SEAM , are not present in FAQ

                            OsCache has a very good taglib for using with jsf pages.
                            but i do not have clue about using it in jsf pages. (which has backing beans ....)

                            I have hopes that some other features like caching come with seam .
                            any project wich goes to use Ejb ,imho, need some caching in all its layer , so it will be very good and interesting if seam come with builtin caching mechanisms


                            • 11. Re: some questions about SEAM , are not present in FAQ
                              gavin.king

                              OK, done some investigation.

                              OSCache should work with JSF if you are using JSP as the view.

                              It will *not* work with Facelets, unfortunately.

                              We are discussing with Jacob how to get OSCache working with facelets.

                              • 12. Re: some questions about SEAM , are not present in FAQ

                                it is very good news , having page level cache or even cache some part of a page is a feature that many developers need.
                                for me SEAM is the framework of choice as soon as i can build jsr portlets with it because my job is building portlets for at least next 6 month.
                                I read that Jboss IDE support generating seam based applications , is that true ?

                                • 13. Re: some questions about SEAM , are not present in FAQ
                                  gavin.king

                                  yes, that is correct