While Seam is great, is any weakness of this framework?

[vwvbc]

First, I shall say that I just start to learn how to use Seam. I am doing a research of this framework for a coming project. From what I have learned so far, I haven't seen any information on how it integrates with other technologies, say scheduling.

[fperedo]

For me the main weaknesses are:
-It is (IMHO) hard to use it without JBoss (just try OC4J for example)
-The limit of "what can be done with seam using a fully compliant J2EE5, and what can't be done" are not clear (clear limitations, clear drawbacks)
-Using seam without using seam-gen, is hard, and IMHO very undocumented (no good step by step tutorial going form very simple POJO stuff to J2EE5 integration without the help of seam-gen).
-And finally, not directly related, but all examples included in seam distribution share the same huge ant file, so it is really hard for a newbie in both ant and seam to understand how examples are deployed, and how to customize them to learn basic stuff.

[pmuir]

"fperedo" wrote:
-It is (IMHO) hard to use it without JBoss (just try OC4J for example)

We could certainly help you guys out by having an up to date list of what servers we've tested Seam on, and which we haven't. AFAIK (but this really isn't my area) OC4J isn't one of them - I think they are JBoss, Tomcat, Glassfish, Websphere and Weblogic. If you raise a JIRA issue we can get the docs updated :)

-The limit of "what can be done with seam using a fully compliant J2EE5, and what can't be done" are not clear (clear limitations, clear drawbacks)

We've tried to indicate when something needs EE5 in the manual - do you have specific cases?

-Using seam without using seam-gen, is hard, and IMHO very undocumented (no good step by step tutorial going form very simple POJO stuff to J2EE5 integration without the help of seam-gen).
-And finally, not directly related, but all examples included in seam distribution share the same huge ant file, so it is really hard for a newbie in both ant and seam to understand how examples are deployed, and how to customize them to learn basic stuff.

There is a reason we have seam-gen - packaging Seam apps is *very* complicated (so many of the questions on the forum relate to it) and seam-gen takes the pain out of it for you! If nothing else, run seam-gen, build a skeleton app, and that as your template for packaging your app - but I would strongly recommend seam-gen!

[stu2]

Scheduling is a major focus of the next release of Seam. http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/JBSEAM?report=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.project:roadmap-panel and specifically http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/JBSEAM-161.

I agree with the previous poster about Seam being very tough to get working if you're not using SeamGen. I simply caved, use the SeamGen structure, and it's been fine.

While Seam has specific features to simplify integrating with certain technologies (anything EJB3 for instance, captcha, JBPM, WebServices in next release, etc.), I can't think of any limitations on what you could integrate with. You should be able to do anything with Seam you can do with Java.

[fperedo]

Hi!
Thanks for answering so fast...

Maybe it is just me.. but I feel that lines between "cant be done without J2EE5" and "can't be done without the microcontainer" and "can be done with just tomcat" are blurry... perhaps if the documentation included some kind of feature matrix comparing the functionality of seam on each case? (also... if it can be deployed to tomcat shouldn't that mean it should be easy to deploy pretty much everywhere?)

The thing I don't like about seam-gen, is that I feel like my applications gets to have lots of code I don't quite understand... and therefore... if something it that generated code fails... its going to be really hard to fix... I would like to be able to build a really really simple example and add stuff to it, to understand exactly what is done by each piece of the project...

[vwvbc]

"stu2" wrote:
While Seam has specific features to simplify integrating with certain technologies (anything EJB3 for instance, captcha, JBPM, WebServices in next release, etc.), I can't think of any limitations on what you could integrate with. You should be able to do anything with Seam you can do with Java.

It is great to hear that.

What is the next release time table?

Right now, I can't see how to do a small set of integrations that I have done with Spring.

[delphi'sghost]

Regarding packaging, I started with Netbeans, and built the whole ear/jar/war project structure, and built it from scratch (obviously utilizing the documentation and examples, and a couple of posts from Netbeans bloggers) and it went pretty well and I'm fairly new at Java. I think it is very documented in the reference manual, there is just no step-by-step, but every step needed is included in the reference guide somewhere, from directory structure to config file contents.

My problem with Seam-gen comes from the fact that projects get ugly in eclipse with jar files everywhere and folders strewn about, or not displayed at all in Netbeans. This is partly due to the loose nature of Java projects held together with a build script I guess.
I'd love to see an option in seam gen where you choose an IDE and it generates the project based on the IDE chosen as opposed to trying to shoehorn the IDE structure over the seam-gen structure.

IMO, the only benefit seam-gen really gets you is the hot-deploy since deploying on html changes sucks. If it weren't for that, I'd be using my own project strucutre in Netbeans with a nice neat organizer project. However, for a new project, I'd start by using seam-gen and then cannibalizing the generated project for the config files.

Another aspect is that given the Exadel partnership, the formal seam/jboss path will be Eclipse only which again, sucks for Netbeans users. Of course if you love Eclipse, this won't be a problem. I just happen to prefer Netbeans over Eclipse.

One thing I did run into was the issue of modularizing EJB jars, which didn't seem to go down too well. I didn't delve very far into it, and this is from memory, but I recall things got messed up if I had 2 jar projects in the ear when it came to deployment. It may have been the fact that the 2 jars contained Entity beans that needed registration with Seam/hibernate.
I'm not sure how you go about developing with and using multiple jar files with seam gen, which may be another issue. Someone with more experience may be able to offer an answer on that one.

[stu2]

"vwu98034" wrote:

It is great to hear that.

What is the next release time table?

Right now, I can't see how to do a small set of integrations that I have done with Spring.

They have some major features to add... Generally releases come ever month and a half. Someone mentioned a while back they may have a beta out by the end of this month, but personally I suspect the 80 remaining items in Jira mean sometime in June.

What sorts of integrations are you concerned about?

[hstang]

I'm not sure why people have so many problems with deployment. When I first started using Seam, I didn't use seam-gen but I got it up and running no problems. Just grab a working seam example (e.g. seam-booking), unpack the ear file and look at how the J2EE/seam pieces fit together, then create your own build.xml to do something similar for your own project.

Nowadays I find myself using seam-gen to see if there are something example codes that is generated to demonstrate some particular usage (i.e. EntityHome)

[delphi'sghost]

The thing I don't like about seam-gen, is that I feel like my applications gets to have lots of code I don't quite understand... ...

Hey, this isn't app fuse ;-)

I had the exact same problem with app fuse, so I understand your concern, but seam-gen creates very little code and it is mostly config stuff, almost all of which is documented in the pdf reference guide.

The only generated code is the authenticator.java which is simply a class with an empty authenticate function. Beyond that, it is just configuration stuff.

I do agree with you on the aspect of understanding some of the security stuff, but that mostly comes from me not knowing drools & security.

My only other criticism comes from the silent failures. Where something doesn't work, but it won't say why. You create a page, click a link, and nothing happens, no log generated on the server, nothing, or you are using a datatable, and click a link to go to a new page and find the datamodelselection is either null or the first item. Those are the problems which make you pull your hair out and at the end are usually annoyingly simple and obvious. Then again, thats probably not so much seam specific as I'm sure other frameworks have the same problem.

[fperedo]

Hi!
I will have to integrate part of my projects with Flex, so I have to use eclipse (Flex is an eclipse plugin) if it werent for that, I would prefer to use Netbeans IDE (for me Eclipse is not an IDE, it is... only a "DE", plug ins are just not integrated enough, but I will have to use it, because we don't have enough RAM to run both)
Maybe I find Seam hard to use, because i have to use it with Eclipse... and I have been trying to use it with a WTP project (without ant) and maybe using ant is just a requirement (god I miss Netbeans and is really transparent ant integration)

[stu2]

There's code in cvs for integrating with GWT, and a pretty sophisticated remoting mechanism for general webapps. I'm not familiar with how remoting via Flex would work, but it should be very doable. You might make a top-level post on that to see if anyone else is doing it.

You're going to have issues with WTP (no ant). But it works fine if you just use a java project. There's an eclipse builder that fires ant on resource changes, and it works quite well. I think it's all setup correctly in seam-gen, ready to import into eclipse.

[supernovasoftware.com]

Could someone please comment on the status and technology plans for scheduling integration for seam 1.3?

[christian.bauer]

Sorry, what integration?

[vwvbc]

"stu2" wrote:
What sorts of integrations are you concerned about?

Scheduling is definitely one integration I am looking for in a web framework. In general, I will use a framework with a great flexibility that allows me to integrate other technologies easily.