Frustrated and anxious

[cja987]

I'm really frustrated at how cumbersome getting started with Seam is. I've spent close to a week trying to find a skeleton app that is friendly to eclipse WTP. I have given up -- seamgen didn't work for me and fiddling with the sample apps doesn't give me a self-contained build.xml, let alone a sane project structure (what's with /resources?).

I really like Seam I am really jazzed about EJB finally working, uh, seamlessly with a solid template technology like facelets, and I'm really intrigued by the DWR features that I haven't even gotten to yet. Yet due to the problems with getting started and the continued low profile I'm afraid it's not getting the support and development resources it deserves, and that it's going to get abandoned for whatever shiny new thing comes along next. If Java Studio Creator manages to do facelets in the next version, it might just be the better option (depends on what kind of annotation support I can get with it I guess).

The CRUD app generation in Hibernate tools looks like the best bet, even if it doesn't generate a proper multi-project structure with a separate EAR. But since EJB3 is supposed to be about POJOs anyway, and Seam about making it even more nimble, so maybe I really should stop trying to force it into J2EE 1.4 shapes and just go with the single-project flow. I can just make ant deploy the run target and presto it's eclipse-friendly again.

[maxandersen]

I hear you, but I would like to say that it is more an IDE issue than so much else ;)

Anyhow, we are working on this and the stuff done by James in context of seamgen is the first step. Did you try and run in the eclipse wtp mode ?

It should just "work".

Hibernate tools generation currently just mimics the ant deployable development as done in seam it self and its examples. that is also being improved with the goal of merging the seamgen efforts and hibernate tools so we get something more unified.

in short, we are working on it...and you do know we accept help and contributions, right ? :)

[cja987]

Oh the framework looks terrific -- I come here to praise seam, not to bury it :) I'm just chomping at the bit to get started, and feeling frustrated by the tools. It's probably not helped by the fact that I'm taking up JEE after only having dabbled in it years previously, so I'm having to re-learn all the tools and environment, and I'm having to learn the actual ins and outs of EARs instead of relying on my clicky GUI tools. Meanwhile, eclipse's JEE 5 support is pretty darn patchy, while Netbeans keeps throwing tracebacks at me. It must be a sign for me to quit IDE's or plunk down 5 Benjamins for IDEA. Frustrating 8-/

As for seamgen, I did indeed use the WTP mode, and scaffold-wtp-project. Eclipse complains about missing enterprise-beans tags, and when I fool it by commenting out the schema declaration attribute of ejb-jar, the JBoss deployer steps in and declares foul play; this is shown on another thread in the forum. Initially I had worse problems, since seamgen's set-properties won't overwrite the existing build.properties, which has defaults for win32.

[wondermike]

chuckadams, I think you should give the guys at jboss more time to improve the tools around the framework. The forum is a perfect place to give feedback about the errors and to receive immediate help.
On the other hand I expect being able to work with a framework and not need to post it's bugs into a forum. Well I didn't pay for the framework, so I try to at least help those guys who really do the job by testing the software. That's what they may expect from me. In Germany we've got a saying for that: "One hand washes the other hand".
Maybe the version numbering is a little bit way too optimistic, but putting out too many CR's would never lead to a version 1.0.0
Of course you may lean back and wait for some later version, but being part of the future right now is much more thrilling.
I hope, I didn't offend you with my opinion.

[maxandersen]

so in other words, seamgen actually generated the correct structure but Eclipse WTP complains because it does not support JEE5......not much I can do there right now.

So just use seamgen to generate with it and use jbosside deployer or ant to do the deployment.

...but as wondermike says you are on the edge of things now show expect some bumps and feel free to help out with making it a smoother ride.

[dougorr]

I'm not sure if this helps, but I am also trying to get started with Seam and am using the Eclipse UI. My approach was to use the Registration Tutorial in the Seam documentation. I created my own project structure and my own build.xml. It took a while to get this to work because I overlooked that Seam needs a seam.properties file in its ear, even if the file is empty. This seems like a bug but once I accepted that requirement everything worked ok.

As for JEE5 support, you have to make sure that Eclipse knows about which version of the compiler you are using and that the same default is being used by the internal Ant processes. Once this is set correctly I didn't have any trouble with annotations.