Seam Eclipse resp. JDS wizards - docs?, how to come to RAD?

[bobgee]

Hi there,

I didn't manage to find a documentation to the Seam wizards in Eclipse/JBoss Developer Studio.
Could anybody give me a reference on how is it meant to work with?
... and could the Seam development team give a "roadmap"/statement how it's going to be?

My main question is how to proceed after having started a project by generating files using
"Seam Generate Entity -> Reverse Engineer from Database".
After adding a new entity, there seems to be no way to generate the pertaining xhtmls list/edit/view including their .page.xml files and the *Home and *List session beans.
"Seam Generate Entity -> use existing entities" generates again for all entities, their should be an option to select the entity to generate the files for.

In my opinion it's still a long way to RAD (Rapid Application Development) with Seam.
What do you think, what's the plan?

I tried "Generate Entity -> reverse engineer" after having let hibernate create the table.
The problem hereby is that uppercase letters in the middle of the entity class name (CamelCase naming) get lost (table names are created lowercase) and genated files (and thus home and list classes) are lowercase.
It's lots of hand work to refactor all the files to the original entity name with CamelCase naming, especially the WebContent files.
New / "Seam form" works different and only does "half the work" as revers engineer does (no Home, no view/list xhtml, no .page.xml).

I looked at
http://docs.jboss.org/tools/whatsnew  and
http://in.relation.to/Bloggers/JBossTools3CR2Released
to find some really news regarding that topic but didn't find.

I'm using JDS 2.0.0.CR1 (3.0.0.CR1-R200812221144)
resp. Eclipse 3.4.1 with JBoss/Seam Tools 3.0.0.CR1-R200812191611

Thanks a lot!
Robert

[bobgee]

Hmmm, no answer. (?)
Something wrong with the question?
The answer too simple, too complex; already wellknown??

Is there anybody willing to tell me how he/she uses the the Seam wizards in Eclipse
and what is your opinion about it?

Do you still use the commandline Seam gen?
Nearly all tutorials are about those archaic tools (sorry developers!).
Are there any alternatives for creating the classes and views for a new entity other than copying the code of an existing entity?

Any statement welcome!
Regards,
Robert

[luxspes]

Robert Grampp wrote on Mar 06, 2009 13:42:


Hi there,

I didn't manage to find a documentation to the Seam wizards in Eclipse/JBoss Developer Studio.
Could anybody give me a reference on how is it meant to work with?
... and could the Seam development team give a roadmap/statement how it's going to be?

I think those question are for JBossTools Forum

My main question is how to proceed after having started a project by generating files using
"Seam Generate Entity -> Reverse Engineer from Database".
After adding a new entity, there seems to be no way to generate the pertaining xhtmls list/edit/view including their .page.xml files and the Home and List session beans.
Seam Generate Entity -> use existing entities generates again for all entities, their should be an option to select the entity to generate the files for.

Current stable release does not allow for that selection, I think they are working in something like that for the next (3.0) release, check JBossTools JIRA

In my opinion it's still a long way to RAD (Rapid Application Development) with Seam.
What do you think, what's the plan?

I agree, it is still a long way to RAD.

[bobgee]

Thanks, Francisco, for your reply!

I agree, it is still a long way to RAD.

It's good to have another opinion.
I will ask this in the tools forum.
It seems, that the Seam/JBoss team doesn't lay much emphasis on Seam wizards.

Greets, Robert

[dhiraj]

thats why i use netbeans ide to generate entities. It allow us to generate entity class for selected table and it also allow to set what name you want for your entity class. By default it use table name as Class name.

for every thing else you can use eclipse/jboss tools.

Regards,
Dhiraj

[bobgee]

thats why i use netbeans ide to generate entities

Hmm, what about Seam UI generation in Netbeans??
How do you create list, view, edit UIs?

it also allow to set what name you want for your entity class. By default it use table name as Class name.

Ok, that might help to maintain the CamelCase naming of classes.
Maybe I could workaround this flaw in Eclipse Seam wizard by naming my tables CamelCase-wise - but some DBs have problems with mixed case names.

Regards, Robert

[jkronegg]

We use RAD 7.5 (based on Eclipse 3.4.1) and Jboss Tools 3.0.0.CR2 to generate the new Seam Project (called xxx): this give us a working project in the sense that it has a Welcome page and can be deployed on the application server (IBM Websphere 6.1 and 7.0).

Then, we generate a project (called xxxGen) using the command line tool seam-gen: this give us another project which contains the entities, *Home, *List, and all .xhtml pages.

Then we copy the required files from the generated project xxxGen to the new project xxx.

This way, we can regenerate the whole project xxxGen without impacting the xxx project. This is usefull when you do not want your custom code (e.g. Hibernate search annotations, added methods, serial version uid) to be modified (yes, we also could set some of the custom code in the seam-gen.reveng.xml file). We also do not feed the xxx project with code that are not needed (e.g. we do not copy the *Home if we do not need them; BTW this decrease Seam startup time).

BTW, seam-gen has a lot of functionalities for customizing the code generation (including the camel case): have a look to the seam-gen.reveng.xml, *.ftl, ${SEAM_HOME}/seam-gen/src/*. It's a bit tricky to understand and not very well documented, but depending on your project size, this may be very useful. For example, we have about 3'000 tables, so we cannot afford hand-made modifications on each table.

Here, we wanted to develop a lot of small application which use a subset of the 3'000 tables, all applications having the same styles and layout. Clearly, we make economy of scale on the number of projects (we invested some time for the first project, but will gain on the long term). But maybe this approach is not suited to all companies, project number and size.

Could you describe:

• How many Seam application you plan to develop?


• How many tables will each Seam application use?


• Which application server do you use?

[seamuser.ralnet.ext.fidelia-assistance.fr]

Hi I would like to create a new seam project under RAD 7.5 but on the first wizard I am blocked with the Target Server I always have non and cannot follow with the wizard. Any hint?

See other comments here: http://seamframework.org/Documentation/RunningDefaultSeamWebProjectCreatedUsingRAD751UnderWebsphere7001