11 Replies Latest reply on Oct 8, 2009 3:34 PM by luxspes

    Adoption plans for EE 6, Seam 3 and Weld

    asookazian

      After doing professional Seam 2.x development for 2.5 years, and being in the job market for the past several months, I've noticed that either Seam and/or the stack involving JSF/Seam/EJB3 has been somewhat of a failure (to put it nicely) in the industry in terms of adoption.  There are virtually no Seam jobs after 3 years since the release of 1.0.0.GA.  I understand that Spring is a more mature stack/framework than Seam but 3 years is a long time in the Java space.


      What has Redhat/JBoss done or doing or planning to do to improve the adoption rate for Seam (and specifically Seam 3 and now Weld which is the RI for 299 in EE 6)?


      What has the EG and/or community or companies sponsoring EE 6 (e.g. Sun, IBM, Oracle, Redhat, SpringSource) done or currently doing to ensure high adoption rates of JSF 2.0, JPA 2.0, EJB 3.1, EE 6 compliant app servers, Weld, etc.?  How many shops are running EE 5 servers without Seam?  Seems like everyone is running Tomcat with Spring/JDBC/Hibernate, etc.  I would love to work on projects running on a EE 6 server (like JBoss 6?) one day.  But that day may be a couple years away at earliest. 


      I really enjoyed creating and working on Seam apps but now I don't have that opportunity any longer b/c I was forced to change jobs and Seam developer jobs are almost impossible to find.  Is this partially attributable to the lack of marketing by Redhat?  How hard is Redhat/JBoss marketing JBoss 6 and Weld, for example?

        • 1. Re: Adoption plans for EE 6, Seam 3 and Weld
          nickarls

          I recall having said this in a similar thread but I'll go again: Don't sit around and wait for Seam jobs to just magically appear. Look for jobs in with the Java EE tag, go to the job interviews and sell it.


          Don't say I'm a Seam 2.2.0.GA developer. Say I'm familiar with dependency injection frameworks in Java EE. And if you hire me know, you'll get a head start with what will be the de facto standard soon ;-)


          But having said that, it would be nice to have some sort of Statement of Direction from RedHat/JBoss saying Seam will be the core framework for all our Java EE software efforts. We stand firmly behind it and we will prove it

          • 2. Re: Adoption plans for EE 6, Seam 3 and Weld
            pmuir

            I can answer a few of your points:



            • Recently I have seen a few Seam jobs in the UK pop up. Currently I am at JavaBlend in Slovenia, and the biggest Java consultancy there is a big Seam shop, and use it extensively in client projects. So there are jobs out there, even in this lean time! But as Nik says, because Seam builds on Java EE, advertise yourself as an EE developer, then sell the company Seam :-)




            • The EE web profile should recapture some of the webapp market IMO (take a look at JBoss Enterprise Web Platform for a preivew of this). However we recognize some people just want to use Tomcat, so Weld and Seam both run on Tomcat, and we will continue to improve our support for this environment (take a look at JBoss Enterprise Web Server for this, I imagine we will support Weld on that for the 6.x series).




            • JBoss and then Red Hat has put more marketing $$$ into Seam and CDI than pretty much any other Java Middleware product over the last few years, I can tell you that. However, Red Hat is not Oracle (just look at the numbers for ORCL and RHT!) and putting up airport bill boards, TV ads etc. just wouldn't be a good use of our money. What does work well is viral marketing, which is as much up to the community as us :-) BTW keep an eye out for more screencasts, tutorial style articles etc. coming over the next few months. Although not direct marketing, this does increase the visibility of the product, and gives the community something to blog and tweet about.




            • I am discussing a statement such as Nik's with our CTO.



            • 3. Re: Adoption plans for EE 6, Seam 3 and Weld
              asookazian

              Nicklas Karlsson wrote on Oct 07, 2009 11:02:


              I recall having said this in a similar thread but I'll go again: Don't sit around and wait for Seam jobs to just magically appear. Look for jobs in with the Java EE tag, go to the job interviews and sell it.

              Don't say I'm a Seam 2.2.0.GA developer. Say I'm familiar with dependency injection frameworks in Java EE. And if you hire me know, you'll get a head start with what will be the de facto standard soon ;-)

              But having said that, it would be nice to have some sort of Statement of Direction from RedHat/JBoss saying Seam will be the core framework for all our Java EE software efforts. We stand firmly behind it and we will prove it


              It's difficult to sell when you can't say Disney and BofA are using it for externally (or internally) facing web apps.  The production list of users for Seam on this web site are mostly unknown shops.


              Your 2nd point is valid.

              • 4. Re: Adoption plans for EE 6, Seam 3 and Weld
                asookazian

                Pete Muir wrote on Oct 07, 2009 14:03:


                I can answer a few of your points:


                • Recently I have seen a few Seam jobs in the UK pop up. Currently I am at JavaBlend in Slovenia, and the biggest Java consultancy there is a big Seam shop, and use it extensively in client projects. So there are jobs out there, even in this lean time! But as Nik says, because Seam builds on Java EE, advertise yourself as an EE developer, then sell the company Seam :-)




                • The EE web profile should recapture some of the webapp market IMO (take a look at JBoss Enterprise Web Platform for a preivew of this). However we recognize some people just want to use Tomcat, so Weld and Seam both run on Tomcat, and we will continue to improve our support for this environment (take a look at JBoss Enterprise Web Server for this, I imagine we will support Weld on that for the 6.x series).




                • JBoss and then Red Hat has put more marketing $$$ into Seam and CDI than pretty much any other Java Middleware product over the last few years, I can tell you that. However, Red Hat is not Oracle (just look at the numbers for ORCL and RHT!) and putting up airport bill boards, TV ads etc. just wouldn't be a good use of our money. What does work well is viral marketing, which is as much up to the community as us :-) BTW keep an eye out for more screencasts, tutorial style articles etc. coming over the next few months. Although not direct marketing, this does increase the visibility of the product, and gives the community something to blog and tweet about.




                • I am discussing a statement such as Nik's with our CTO.






                thx for the feedback (as always).  A discussion with the CTO (Mark Little?) is very important and Redhat should make a video/blog available regarding this topic from the CTO's perspective. 


                I also think that the Seam libraries should be bundled with the JBoss 5/6 distro, just as the JSF libraries are...

                • 5. Re: Adoption plans for EE 6, Seam 3 and Weld
                  asookazian

                  It's difficult enough to upgrade a version of a framework (we're running OC4J 10.1.2 which is J2EE 1.3 certified!).  It's even more difficult to refactor/redesign or start from scratch and sell that to management.  At Cox, it was much easier to sell Seam b/c we transitioned from .NET platform to JEE platform.  When you have existing Java projects, it's much more difficult.


                  Here, they want to eventually go to JSF.  But the struts-jsf transition library requires Struts 1.2 and we have 1.1. 


                  It's so convenient to totally start from scratch once the dev stack has been finalized....

                  • 6. Re: Adoption plans for EE 6, Seam 3 and Weld

                    Arbi Sookazian wrote on Oct 07, 2009 17:22:


                    I also think that the Seam libraries should be bundled with the JBoss 5/6 distro, just as the JSF libraries are...


                    Since (AFAIK) JBoss 5 has no support (I hope JBoss 6 will) for something like OSGi that makes it possible to avoid classpath hell when conflicting versions of jars are used, I think that bundling Seam inside JBoss would not be good idea, in fact, I already think that bundling JSF and JPA are bad ideas.

                    • 7. Re: Adoption plans for EE 6, Seam 3 and Weld

                      Arbi Sookazian wrote on Oct 07, 2009 17:44:


                      It's difficult enough to upgrade a version of a framework (we're running OC4J 10.1.2 which is J2EE 1.3 certified!).  It's even more difficult to refactor/redesign or start from scratch and sell that to management.  At Cox, it was much easier to sell Seam b/c we transitioned from .NET platform to JEE platform.  When you have existing Java projects, it's much more difficult.


                      That is where Spring beats Seam: Integration with legacy systems. I do like Seam, I has a lot of new ideas and features, but if what you want is to integrate with legacy code, Spring is AFAIK a much more sensible choice




                      Here, they want to eventually go to JSF.  But the struts-jsf transition library requires Struts 1.2 and we have 1.1. 



                      Well, do it in little steps, first, move to Struts 1.2, then move to a newer AS (at least OAS 10.1.3, or JBoss 4.2), then start the transition to JSF (although I would wonder if Struts 2.x is not a better choice, I worked with WebWork (Struts 2.0 before the name change) and it was not a bad experience).



                      It's so convenient to totally start from scratch once the dev stack has been finalized....


                      Remember that starting from scratch killed Netscape. It is a very dangerous thing to do...

                      • 8. Re: Adoption plans for EE 6, Seam 3 and Weld
                        pmuir

                        Pete Muir wrote on Oct 07, 2009 14:03:



                        • I am discussing a statement such as Nik's with our CTO.






                        Well, I checked with Mark what I can say publically. As part of the Andiamo initiative (google for it :-), we (Red Hat) will ensure that all JBoss product use Seam as their integration point for development. Mark plans to blog about this soon.

                        • 9. Re: Adoption plans for EE 6, Seam 3 and Weld
                          pmuir

                          Arbi Sookazian wrote on Oct 07, 2009 17:22:


                          I also think that the Seam libraries should be bundled with the JBoss 5/6 distro, just as the JSF libraries are...


                          From Seam 3, the core DI engine (Weld) is bundled inside JBoss AS. You will be able to update it assuming you keep the x.y version the same. The extensions to the engine (e.g. PDF etc.) will still be bundled in your app (or could be installed as libraries to the AS)

                          • 10. Re: Adoption plans for EE 6, Seam 3 and Weld

                            Pete Muir wrote on Oct 08, 2009 12:07:



                            Pete Muir wrote on Oct 07, 2009 14:03:



                            • I am discussing a statement such as Nik's with our CTO.






                            Well, I checked with Mark what I can say publically. As part of the Andiamo initiative (google for it :-), we (Red Hat) will ensure that all JBoss product use Seam as their integration point for development. Mark plans to blog about this soon.


                            That is good news!

                            • 11. Re: Adoption plans for EE 6, Seam 3 and Weld

                              Pete Muir wrote on Oct 08, 2009 12:19:



                              Arbi Sookazian wrote on Oct 07, 2009 17:22:


                              I also think that the Seam libraries should be bundled with the JBoss 5/6 distro, just as the JSF libraries are...


                              From Seam 3, the core DI engine (Weld) is bundled inside JBoss AS. You will be able to update it assuming you keep the x.y version the same. The extensions to the engine (e.g. PDF etc.) will still be bundled in your app (or could be installed as libraries to the AS)


                              If this goes with support to avoid classpath hell in JBoss AS, then it is good news... if not.. then... I guess I see more Tomcat in my future