Confused about Seam/JSF/Facelets Tools - Seeking some Guidel

[terryb]

Hi,

I am new to Seam. I am trying to work out which tools to use to start developing seam applications, but more I read more confusion I get myself in to.

I like the concept behind Seam and am doing my best to be at ease with Seam development so I can convert current JSP web application on Tomcat TO JBoss Seam/JFS/Facelets on JBoss AS.

However with so many different posts about project set up and conflicts in development tools (JBoss IDE/WTP) it is becoming rather confusing to pick a clear starting point.

Objective:

I would like to write web application using Seam, JSF, Facelets (xhtml).

My Current Environment:
Windows, Eclipse 3.1 with WTP. JBoss IDE 1.6, JBoss AS 4.0.5.

I have generated seam application using Seam-Gen; and got it working from eclipse and auto deployment to JBoss AS. However, it seems JBoss IDE does not have graphical interface for JSF pages etc. The way Eclipse WTP does. And I keep reading using WTP will break this and that with Seam project.

Can any one provide guidline which development tools to use. which provides some sort of graphical tools to simplify JSF/Facelets development???

Thanks you.

[svadu]

I use Exadel eclipse plugin to work with JSF/Facelets and MyEclipse to work with JSF navigations (it visualizes them). I think if you install exadel plugin you should be fine.

[kukeltje]

The exadel plugin is less usable with seam since
- it does not know about the annotations and therefor has no codecompletion, validation
- does not know how to visually display seam tags
- ...

Since I do not use jsf pageflow with seam (jpdl) and therefore this plugin becomes less and less usable.

I personally am looking into Taylor at the moment (http://taylor.sf.net) in addition to exadel. This guy is doing some nice work I think

[terryb]

Thank you guys for the response. I think many seam starters are in my position. who look at seam for seam+jsf+facelets+xhtml development; but get go around the circles trying to workout dev tool that delivers this functionality.

I will appreciate more responses from experiences with dev tools in this area.

as I understand JBoss recommend above seam+jsf+facelets+xhtml combination; so it will be nice if they can also say ...we recommend this single dev environment or set of tools to develop a solution from start to end....

[vladimir.kovalyuk]

Although I didn't find anything about Seam in JIRA JBIDE
I hope eventually JBOSS IDE will be shipped with Seam plugins.

[svadu]

"kukeltje" wrote:
The exadel plugin is less usable with seam since
- it does not know about the annotations and therefor has no codecompletion, validation

I do have code completion and validation (as well as recognision of annotations). Although I have MyEclipse installed next to exadel which can be the reason why I have it.

"kukeltje" wrote:

- does not know how to visually display seam tags
- ...

True, this problem exist. Although I don't have much troubles with it.

"kukeltje" wrote:

Since I do not use jsf pageflow with seam (jpdl) and therefore this plugin becomes less and less usable.

Are you using only pages.xml? That's interesting as JBoss guys (I think it was Gavin) said that pages.xml is normally used for wizards, so I guess you must have pretty specific application.

"kukeltje" wrote:

I personally am looking into Taylor at the moment (http://taylor.sf.net) in addition to exadel. This guy is doing some nice work I think

Yep that one looks interesting.

[terryb]

I tried finding tylor the site seems down and google doesn't return useful link. I guess I will keep trying the site url you wrote.