[OT] Seam and Tomahawk - lost property?

[imario]

Hi!

I wonder about the style used in this forum when it comes to posts where user complain about the interoperability between Seam and Tomahawk.

In the past we (I) tried some stuff in Tomahawk-sandbox which might have had some influence with Seam, but this has been fixed (as far as I know).
Tomahawk itself do nothing strange with e.g. the Lifecycle, at least as far as I am aware.
A sandbox is always a dangerous thing.

Maybe there are better looking/working JSF component libraries out there , but still, there is no reason to be this negative against Tomahawk and _force_ people to NOT use it.

So, instead of ranting around here, it would be great if you (the JBoss Seam Team) could give us a hint if something went wrong so that we can fix it, or, at least, document the incompatibilities so that users do not have to spent eons of time to figure out themself.


Maybe we should sign a contract with Jboss about the effort to make our techniques better compatible.
Just as everyone do with M$ these days.


Thanks!
Ciao,
Mario

[imario]

"imario" wrote:

Maybe we should sign a contract with Jboss about the effort to make our techniques better compatible.
Just as everyone do with M$ these days.

For sure, this was meant ironic :-)

[gavin.king]

Whatever.

I try to give people advice that will help them have success on their projects. It's pretty easy to tell when certain products are unhelpful by simply seeing the number of, and the nature of, problems that users experience.

I'm not making this judgment in a vacuum. I'm comparing the number of problems with one library against the number of problems with other libraries. And I'm mixing in knowledge from my own review of the source code, and from trying to debug problems with Tomahawk that were reported as bugs in Seam. At some stage I realize that I simply can't support this thing because there are too many issues, and I have only so many hours in the day.

[gavin.king]

I mean, you are free to do what you like. Use Tomahawk, please, that's totally up to you. But if you choose to not take our well-meaning advice, then don't you think its unreasonable to expect us to support your decision by answering lots of forum questions?

[imario]

Even if you had this experience in the past didn't mean that they are still true.
And - what gives you the right to judge in such a drastic way.

A search about "tomahawk" (using the search box in the right upper corner) brought up 6 hits, not *that* much, is it?

Once in the past I expressed my personal feeling that Seam is too feature overloaded, immediately one of you guys campaign against me to stop saying such things. And I stopped.
I learned its your decision what you put into Seam.

So, what I would like to see is that we try to make our libraries work together and NOT yelling against each other till the end of time.

In the end the winners are our users, they just can use what they want.

There is no need for you to fix our bugs, but to give us a change to know about them would be great.

So instead of forcing people not to use tomahawk redirect them to our user form [1]

---
Mario

[1] http://myfaces.apache.org/mail-lists.html

[gavin.king]

Even if you had this experience in the past didn't mean that they are still true.

Fair enough, I'm willing to give you guys a chance.

And - what gives you the right to judge in such a drastic way.

What gives me the right is I'm the one people are asking for advice. If users ask you for advice, I believe it is your responsibility to tell them your honest opinion, ie, what you believe will help them have the most success on their project.

A search about "tomahawk" (using the search box in the right upper corner) brought up 6 hits, not *that* much, is it?

Ahem, the search is quite bad, there have of course been many more threads than that (probably more like 100).

Once in the past I expressed my personal feeling that Seam is too feature overloaded, immediately one of you guys campaign against me to stop saying such things. And I stopped.

I have no idea who "one of you guys" refers to, but it certainly wasn't me, and I have not heard of any such "campaign" or anything else about this episode.

I learned its your decision what you put into Seam.

Sure. And its your perfect right to critique my decisions.

So instead of forcing people not to use tomahawk redirect them to our user form

OK, I'll try that, but if we keep seeing the large number of problems we were seeing before, I'm going to have to reinstate the previous policy.

You see, in light of the bugs we've seen in the past, *someone* is going to have to test Seam+Tomahawk. I'm not going to do it because, frankly, the components offered in Tomahawk are not interesting to me and because I believe there are better alternatives. Are *you* guys going to take responsibility for this testing? If the answer is "no", then what's going to happen is that users will find the problems, and they will get frustrated with us because we don't want to take responsibility for them.

[pmuir]

"imario" wrote:
A search about "tomahawk" (using the search box in the right upper corner) brought up 6 hits, not *that* much, is it?

That search is for the website. I did a quick search of the forum, and found 19 pages (so about 190 topics) that reference Tomahawk.

So instead of forcing people not to use tomahawk redirect them to our user form [1]

Perhaps that should go on as a sticky? Also, perhaps if one of the tomahawk people was to monitor this forum to deal with people's problems integrating with Seam (even if it is to direct them to myfaces mailing list)? (I think this is where the problem started - people kept saying they couldn't get tomahawk to work here and nobody was able to help them)

From my experience of using Tomahawk (perhaps I was wrong, perhaps stuff has been improved since I last used it) there is some 'odd' ways of doing stuff in there that doesn't make it play nicely with other frameworks e.g. you couldn't put a f:param into a t:navigationMenuItem (AFAICS it looks like this is fixed now)

[gavin.king]

If you want to know, you guys will get really far with:

"yes, we acknowledge that there were some problems in the past, but we've worked hard to get them fixed and, hey, what we'll do is we'll go ahead and test our stuff with Seam before the next release, and try to help out with some of the Tomahawk related questions in the forum"

You won't get so far with:

"you have no right to criticize our stuff"

*Everyone* has a right. And the willingness to acknowledge the existence of problems where they exist is in fact one of the things that gives people confidence in a project.

[imario]

WE always work hard fixing our bugs if we are aware of them, though, some of us are idealistic open-source developers, means, they are not hired by a company which has a separate department just for open-source development.
Some of use (me included) spend many, many hours of our private time to get things right.

I guess you used

"you have no right to criticize our stuff"

as summary for our conversations, do you?
If so, then I have to say I *didn't* say that you are not allowed to criticize. In fact everyone has the right to do so as long as it has some substance, means, just saying

"Your life will be a lot easier if you steer clear of all this Tomahawk stuff and get a better JSF library."

all over the time is not valid.

But hey, I think in the end it was a good discussion, and I feel positive for the future.

At first what I can promise is, that we take Seam integration problems serious if we get aware of them.
Second, I'll try to find some time to check Seam with tomahawk, though, without any timeframe as it requires some time to setup a tomahawk based sample application with Seam ;-)

[andrew.rw.robinson]

Tomahawk & Seam guys, is there a way we can end the flame wars?

I am using Tomahawk and Seam together for two projects and have not had many issues (at least that I know of). Instead of saying don't use tomahawk or don't use seam, why don't we just work through bugs and fix the issues. Both libraries are very useful for us users (let us not forget the users) and it would be great to have them play together.

If myfaces/tomahawk would just start creating bug fix releases instead of new functionality versions all the time, I'd be willing to help fix the bugs on their side.

Lets quit the arguments and get these libraries to co-exist well. I'm sure there are plenty of other users that use both too and we are your testers.

-Andrew

[smokingapipe]

I mean, you are free to do what you like. Use Tomahawk, please, that's totally up to you. But if you choose to not take our well-meaning advice, then don't you think its unreasonable to expect us to support your decision by answering lots of forum questions?

In fact it's perfectly reasonable for you to not answer any forum questions. You've already provided a fantastic free open-source framework. That's not required or expected of you. Answering questions on a forum is even less required or expected. We should be happy to get expert-level advice like this on a forum.

As for Tomahawk, I have seen Gavin's (and others) repeated posts that say, "don't use it." I used it and it got me on the wrong track, and now I'm having to spend time ripping it out because it's just not working. The scoop is Icefaces will work with Seam, and Icefaces has some way cooler features than Tomahawk anyway, so after I get my app up and running I'm going to start adding some Icefaces to it.

It's too bad about Tomahawk because it does have some nice things, especially the sortable tables, but it's too painful to make it work.

[bischoje]

+1 on working towards better cooperation between Tomahawk and Seam (both the Products and the Teams ;)

[popcorn09]

"Bischoje" wrote:
+1 on working towards better cooperation between Tomahawk and Seam (both the Products and the Teams ;)

+1 from my side too! :)

[javasmith]

Well,

3 months later, and it looks like we are now going in horribly divergent directions. Myfaces is initiating the Fusion project which essentially competes with Seam. I can't help but think if we'd worked together in December this whole mess could have been avoided. Mario, I commend you for taking the initiative to resolve integration problems.

Gavin, I'm sorry but your initial response of "Whatever." set the stage for failure. There is a huge Tomahawk user base which will suffer. As one of those users, I will now be using Fusion, it seems.

[supernovasoftware.com]

Seam+Richfaces have a fair amount of overlap. I am using Tomahawk tags in my app:

1. dataTable
I will be switching these out asap to Richfaces. I currently have no problem with them, but the Richfaces on looks better. I will see how this process goes. If I have to makes substantial changes to my code. I will try to see if I had been taken down the wrong track as SmokingAPipe stated. I have had this feeling before.

2. buffer
I use this to buffer a error message for an input field and then write it into the title of input field for easy mouse over without javascript. I am sure there is an easy Seam or Facelets way to do this. If any one has suggestions, I welcome them.

3. inputCalendar
Seam now has a date picker and there is no reason not to switch to that. This is all encapsulated in a Facelets tag so the upgrade with be a snap. In theory ;)

4. panelTabbedPane
Richfaces has tabPanel and I will switch this out as well.

5. jscookMenu
I have no problems with this tag. It provides the majority of the navigation to my application. I do not plan on changing this until there is an equivalent in richfraces.

I doubt that all tomahawk components are bad. If Richfaces or Seam had overlapping functionality the why not go with those.

There should be documentation on the compatibility of different individual components with Seam. It should be easy to find this information. Possibly there could be a section on the wiki that list component sets and each component. Then users could comment on individual components and the Seam team could even comment on compatibly. I think that this would give people a chance to collaborate regarding their experience in a more organized fashion than the forums. The bottom line is that Seam rocks and the move component that I can use it with the better. I think if the component respects the JSF spec then it should work with Seam. If it does not then it should be fixed or not used. Users need motivation to comment on their experiece with different tags in an organized fashion that will benefit everyone.

If this is going to rival M$ then there should be a large number of OS components compatible with Seam.

Tomahawk
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Trinidad
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Richfaces
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Woodstock
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