Can Seam do AJAX within AJAX?

[j99976]

Hi all,

I'm currently evaluating technologies for the next version of our product, and I'm really liking the look of Seam, we use Hibernate for our current version, so it looks like a good direction for us to go in.

I'm wondering though if this is possible. We would like to create a very extreme AJAX frontend, where maybe even there will be just one page, ad we will use AJAX to navigate to the different menu and submenu items. This would mean that we would need to be able to render AJAX-enabled items within AJAX-rendered content. I hope this sounds clear enough.

I have done similar stuff, but using raw AJAX calls (in struts, it wasn't very nice), but I'm wondering if the AJAX technologies that Seam uses would allow this. Or does anyone know would the other AJAX frameworks (GWT, Echo2, etc) support this, is this even possible? Or are you stuck with serving individual pages that allow AJAX content, but if you want to navigate into these you need to break into a new full screen call via normal HTTP.

An example would be menu-submenu, or else a n ajax-rendered table that you can drilldown into.

I am very new to AJAX frameworks, so I do apologise if the question sounds daft.

As I am new to all this, would you recommend Seam as the best AJAX-enabled framework to use, for rapid development? We are looking for a framework that is very fast and non-error-prone to develop our frontends in, and that minimises coding.

Thank you in advance for any replies.

[pmuir]

Seam has excellent integration with (Jboss) Ajax4jsf (for ajax enabling existing JSF pages) and RichFaces (for ajax enabled components like suggestion boxes,tables etc) and I'm pretty sure you can do what you want with them. Perhaps asking this in the Ajax4jsf forum would be helpful?

[christian.bauer]

It sounds to me like what you want is basically never trigger navigation. AFAIK you can do that if you never call an action method (only action event listener methods) and if you use ajax4jsf form submits and reRender links.

[j99976]

Wow thanks for the fast replies, thats amazing!

Thats great to know that I'm on the right track, I would have hated to spend a couple of days evaluating and then hitting a snag, so I'm grateful.

I am definitely leaning towards Seam, I have had great success with Hibernate, so hopefully this will be the same. Our current product also uses Struts, which meant a lot of coding, so I'm looking for something that reduces coding as much as possible, and allows us to develop rich frontends beyond what struts allows.

Once again, I appreciate the help, I will be sure to check out the ajax4jsf forum as well.

[gavin.king]

Let us know how you progress :-)

[robjellinghaus]

GWT can definitely do this kind of thing, to the Nth degree. I should have a working GWT / JSF / Seam example by end of May. (I've said this in two threads now, looks like I'm committed :-)