cannot start with Seam and JSF and Facelets, that is no EJB

[mario_lanza]

Hi all,

There seem to be quite some tutorials around to start with Seam and EJB3, with JSP and all that which is supposed to be not essential for using Seam. Much less info without those. No wonder I can't get a simple web application up and running to save my life...

I had an Eclipse 3.2.2 with a trivial web project: a backing session bean displaying text with a facelet. Running fine as such, no Seam yet.
Then I installed the Seam plugin 2.0.0.beta1 with the Eclipse Update (as you probably noticed Eclipse 3.3 cannot install the Seam plugins because of dependencies on 3.2.0), and I put annotations to my backing bean the way the IBM tutorial says (Seamless JSF series, see http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-seam1/index.html). I also edited accordingly facelets-config.xml and web.xml, and aded seam.properties. I also added the seam jars in the lib.
Yay, now I cannot even start the application: some annotations are not found (java.lang.ArrayStoreException: sun.reflect.annotation.TypeNotPresentExceptionProxy, but it won't say which annotation is not found). Playing with the versions of the libraries (myfaces, jsf, whatnot) seems to influence the amount of errors, but I couldn't find a working combination of them.

Then I even downloaded the sample project from the site, which doesn't work either (NoClassDefFoundError without saying WHICH class, again). True, that one was based on Seam 1.1.6, but as it downloaded with Maven all its dependencies I was somehow expecting it to find its stuff around.

I know tutorials are not really your problem, however, can anybody suggest me a startup project, a tutorial, or whatever, which DOES work and doesn't require Application Servers???? I know I could have dumped here all the config files and libraries versions, but I thought I can sort it out by myself...

Many thanks in advance,
M

[mario_lanza]

For the record, this is the first set of errors I get:

11 Sep 2007 16:17:03 INFO org.apache.myfaces.config.FacesConfigurator - Reading config jar:file:/C:/WorkspacePoC/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.wst.server.core/tmp0/webapps/testpoc/WEB-INF/lib/jboss-seam.jar!/META-INF/faces-config.xml
11 Sep 2007 16:17:03 ERROR org.apache.commons.digester.Digester - Parse Error at line 2 column 14: Document is invalid: no grammar found.
org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: Document is invalid: no grammar found.
at org.apache.xerces.util.ErrorHandlerWrapper.createSAXParseException(Unknown Source)

[pmuir]

I would recommend starting with JBoss AS 4.2.1.GA, Seam 2 beta and the reference manual and examples in your download. When you want to create your own project try seam-gen.

N.B. Seam works best with an application server, but if you really just want to run tomcat, then perhaps the hibernate2 example will help

[mario_lanza]

Thank you, it's just that the example(s) wouldn't compile under Java 1.5.0_06-b05 and Ant 1.5.4:

C:\jboss-seam-2.0.0.BETA1\examples\hibernate2>ant tomcat
Buildfile: build.xml

compile:
 [javac] Compiling 9 source files to C:\jboss-seam-2.0.0.BETA1\examples\hibernate2\build\classes
 [javac] C:\jboss-seam-2.0.0.BETA1\examples\hibernate2\src\org\jboss\seam\example\hibernate\AuthenticatorAction.java:3: identifier expected
 [javac] import static org.jboss.seam.ScopeType.SESSION;
 [javac] ^
 [javac] C:\jboss-seam-2.0.0.BETA1\examples\hibernate2\src\org\jboss\seam\example\hibernate\AuthenticatorAction.java:3: '.' expected
 [javac] import static org.jboss.seam.ScopeType.SESSION;
 [javac] ^

[pmuir]

Seam requires Ant 1.6

[mario_lanza]

But Ant 1.7 and 1.6.5 give exactly the same message...

[goku2]

Are you sure you have Java 1.5.0_06-b05 installed correctly?
try
java -version

and

javac -source 1.5

If you get
javac: invalid source release: 1.5

If because your PATH locates a compiler that doesn't support java 1.5

I think this is the problem because
[javac] import static org.jboss.seam.ScopeType.SESSION;
[javac] ^

The static import is a new feature in JDK 1.5

Hope this helps

[mario_lanza]

That was ok, but it hinted me to take a look at the environment variables and guess which version was JAVA_HOME pointing to...

Thank you very very much for your help :) now it compiles at least.

[mario_lanza]

For the record: the missing annotation messages come because of the missing jar jboss-j2ee.jar

[mario_lanza]

I couldn't make Seam work in an existing project with Facelets (no JSP), backing beans (no Spring, no EJB) and the Eclipse plugin (no seam-gen). My aim was not to start from scratch but to convert an existing application. Apparently nobody else tried that.
Well, I'll look again into version 3.