Seam's added contexts

[admin.admin.email.tld]

perhaps the wrong forum, but was wondering if anybody here knows if the .NET platform (ASP.NET specifically I guess) has the equivalent to Seam's conversation and business process contexts.  I had read they have view state, but that's for a postback only (one page).  Request and Session of course.

are there any other frameworks that add these 2 contexts in the Java space or is Seam totally unique in this regard??

[jnusaira]

Halfway of a thread hijack.

Does Spring have the equivelent? I know the Spring Web Flow is like jpdl web flow. And there are many contexts in Grails (i havent played with all of them)

The reason i ask though. Is if the answer is yes then Spring.Net may as well.

Btw ... spring web flow kinda is like a conversation in that you can keep an object in state for that conversation; however, from what i've seen you don't have the powerful ability of switching to different conversations.

[admin.admin.email.tld]

I'm basically curious as to how many other framework designers/developers, etc. have caught on to this idea that Gavin King and the rest of the core Seam team has pioneered and enhanced over the past couple years...

Honestly conversations and workspace switching (see booking demo) are some of the major selling points for this glue framework...

[luxspes]

I have coded in .NET (Both WindowsForms.NET and ASP.NET), I prefer C# to Java (please, lets not start a flame war about that)

The closes thing to seam I saw for ASP.NET was the UIPAB, from a purely theoretical POV, it should be the same thing, but in practice Seam is really far far superior (UIPAB didnt even take advantage of Annotation based programing, something surprising if we take in consideration that C# had annotations before Java).

But microsoft let the UIPAB die (something sad, because it was a single framework for both WindowsForms.NET and ASP.NET) and replaced it with WCSF  and CUIAB, CUIAB is very interesting (I would like to see Seam grow and add those capabilities to Swing based development, perhaps by plugging in to the new JSR-296. I haven't had a chance to test the WCSF, so I don't know if it following the design principles of the UIPAB or if it is an entirely different beast.

[luxspes]

If you take a look at Application Architecture for .NET: Designing Applications and Services and read the UIPAB documentation, you can see that, from a purely theoretical point of view, Microsoft guys were already discussing User process components:

User process components. In many cases, a user interaction with the system follows a predictable process. For example, in the retail application you could implement a procedure for viewing product data that has the user select a category from a list of available product categories and then select an individual product in the chosen category to view its details. Similarly, when the user makes a purchase, the interaction follows a predictable process of gathering data from the user, in which the user first supplies details of the products to be purchased, then provides payment details, and then enters delivery details. To help synchronize and orchestrate these user interactions, it can be useful to drive the process using separate user process components. This way the process flow and state management logic is not hard-coded in the user interface elements themselves, and the same basic user interaction engine can be reused by multiple user interfaces.

The UIPAB supposedly was going to support this kind of programming, and it had base classes for creating your custom state persistence mechanism, etc, etc. But IMHO, their implementation, back there, just wasn't mature enough.

But who knows, I have been disconnected from .NET for around 1 year and a half, perhaps they are already building something similar to Seam... (I don't think so, but sometimes life surprises us ;-) )

[luxspes]

A java framework that is very similar to Seam is Shale. See the comparision here. I haven't tried it, but it does look very similar.