Seam is a sure thing

[dan.j.allen]

In Manning's most recent newletter, they quote:

Seam has the feel of a sure-thing. Seam is gaining lots of attention because of its focus on simplicity, ease of use, transparent integration, and scalability.

So those of you out there who are wondering if Seam is a good investment, I would say that you have your bets in the right place. If you want to see Seam improve, I encourage you to participate using JIRA. The best way to contribute are patches (and sometimes you have to fight for what you believe in).

The newletter continues on with acclaim for Seam in Action.

The writing in Seam in Action is crisp, the technical details are deep and relevant. And recent MEAP sales have exploded in response.

I bring this up because I think it makes up for Manning's ridiculous newletter entitled There is no such thing as a Java developer. I think we all agree that there is such a thing.

[admin.admin.email.tld]

That is a decent book (I have read some of the MEAP) and looking forward to the print release of Seam in Action as well as JBoss in Action (which I have the MEAP for as well).

I just noticed that there is no coverage on Groovy integration in your book.  There is a chapter on Groovy integration in the Seam ref doc/pdf.  Space constraints, most likely.

I am currently reading Groovy in Action and am finding that life would be somewhat easier on a day-to-day basis as a Java developer if we had the ability to use constructs like GStrings, for example.  Saves a lot of typing anyways.

Are there any Seam users in a corporate envmt that are using Groovy with Seam?  What are your experiences?

Our mngmt is saying that we're already bleeding-edge in terms of our tech stack (JSF/Seam/EJB3) and it would be too far ahead to be using Groovy as well, even though it's part of the Seam distro (GDK is in the groovy-all.jar I'm assuming).  Code reviewers would need to learn a new dynamic scripting language (that happens to compile to JVM bytecode).  Everything is an object.  cool stuff.

Are there any disadvantages to using Groovy with Seam?

What is the new release date for your book Dan?

[dan.j.allen]

I just noticed that there is no coverage on Groovy integration in your book.  There is a chapter on Groovy integration in the Seam ref doc/pdf.  Space constraints, most likely.

There are in fact three reasons that I don't have Groovy example specifically in the book (though I do discuss the integration). First, as you pointed out, space constraints. Seam is huge and trying to fit the important stuff in 550 pages isn't trivial. But there is a more important reason, since after all I could have just done some examples in Groovy. While Groovy is cool, its adoption is still small enough that I would confuse a lot of readers by throwing yet another unfamiliar technology in there when they are trying to learn about Seam/JSF/Facelets/RichFaces/JPA. The code examples just wouldn't have been as clear. Likely if you know Groovy, you can easily start using it with Seam. That leads to the last reason, that switching to Groovy is so simple, that there is almost nothing to explain. If I went on about Groovy, then I would be writing Groovy in Action, not Seam in Action.

What is the new release date for your book Dan?

If all goes well, the final MEAP will be Aug 1, the eBook will be ready Aug 15, and the book will be in stores before Sept 1. Pray for me.

[admin.admin.email.tld]

It will be interesting to see how different your book will be from the Seam 2nd ed. Yuan and Orshalick book in terms of material covered...

I haven't been reading the MEAP for Seam in Action a lot (just searching on it as a reference) b/c I'm a book/paper nerd.

Staring at the monitor too much and too long is bad...