Seam community forum slightly "inactive"?

[deadlockgr]

Hi all,

I began using Seam professionally 2 months ago, and I think it is a great addition to JSF. However, whenever I resort to this forum for answers, I most usually don't get one. The same is the case with many forum posts, which are not necessarily naive or non-documented.

Is this the impression of other people as well?

I personally have to resort to other forums, such as StackOverflow, which does not have many Seam Users. In any case, I think that this is the place where a developer using Seam should come first. Already, a lot of knowledge is here, and it needs to be further built up.

I would like to propose that JBoss hires another developer, who would answer here (for half his working time, for instance).

Cheers!

[yahawari]

hi
you are right. may get frustrating sometimes. but honestly, i give seam core developers an excuse. they were too busy getting CDI/Weld to a level that is acceptable to other companies and they got it to be a standard. only now they have shifted their attention to Seam3 (based on Weld). I don't expect seam 2 to get much attention from them now. Seam3 will eat up all their effort.

I have invested heavily in a project based on Seam2 and I really hope that they pull it off nicely for seam 3 (I have great confidence it their team!).

in the mean time, Jboss has to hire other guys to keep the forum alive. we as a community need to give seam developers a push by helping others. or u can subscribe to jboss prof services where they should actually help u :).

best of luck for ur project.

[asookazian]

Yasser Hawari wrote on Apr 16, 2010 05:27:


in the mean time, Jboss has to hire other guys to keep the forum alive. we as a community need to give seam developers a push by helping others. or u can subscribe to jboss prof services where they should actually help u :).

best of luck for ur project.

I've had discussions regarding this problem with Mark Little, CTO of JBoss.  The bottom line is that there is apparently a lack of resources and an expectation for the community to support itself.

I used to post on here and help all the time.  Now I'm learning a new project at work, Maven, Linux and other technologies and have a baby boy (i.e. very precious spare time).

I'm pretty sure that SpringSource does not have this problem in their community/forums (they have a lot of paid and contributing developers).  Also, Max Andersen's team and the RichFaces team regularly respond to forum questions within 24 hrs.  They are very helpful.

The core dev support on this forum is definitely sub-standard and is not sufficient.  But honestly there's a lot of questions posted here that you need to read the reference doc or SiA book first before posting here.  Seam is tough to learn but read the docs first!

btw, the paid dev/prod (EAP) support is very sketchy in terms of SOC, I opened too many out-of-scope cases even though all were regarding the JBoss dev stack and got shut down officially by Redhat management in 2008.  The CSP website was horrible (no code tags and lots of problems in terms of lack of basic forum functionality).  And they don't always provide strategies/answers when they should (this happened to us recently regarding a Hibernate performance problem that we ended up solving by using flushMode COMMIT rather than AUTO in certain cases).  I will say that when they do respond, it's very helpful.  Hopefully they'll do better in the future...

[shane.bryzak]

The push to standardization (i.e. CDI) consumed most of the team's resources for over a year.  With Weld in a stable state the team is now intently focused on the Seam 3 release, and unfortunately that means we can't spare a lot of time on the forums as the effort to drive the project forward takes priority (especially since we haven't had a major Seam release for about a year). 

We don't have a lot of core developers working full time on Seam, but thank goodness we have an awesome community and many great people from this community have stepped forward to contribute to Seam 3, which means we can expect a release much sooner.  I'm certain that once we get the release out the door you'll see a lot more core developer activity on the forums.

[asookazian]

There are many more available resources on Seam 2.x than when I started with Seam 1.x back in 2007.  These include the Seam in Action book and the Yuan et al. book not to mention the excellent Seam ref doc included in the distro.

Keep in mind that the Seam team has lost two developers (CBauer and NRichards) and gained one (LBaxter).  I'm very excited about Seam 3 (somewhat nervous about initial quality/reliability as well as the seam2-bridge in terms of backwards compatibility) but what SBryzak is saying is most likely true, GKing was posting on the Weld forum a couple months ago.

Hopefully there will be many good reasons to upgrade from Seam 2.x to Seam 3.x and even migrate from Spring 2.x to Seam 3.x.  Hopefully the performance with JSF2/Seam3 apps will be much better than JSF1.2/Seam2 and this may very well be the case with the Weld container (CDI RI) becoming the core of Seam...

[xsalefter.xsalefter.yahoo.com]

Hi deadlock gr..

My suggestion for you for this time is just.. be patient :), at least until 4th quarter of this year (I don't know. That just my personal opinion. No fact here.. :D). I think in May/June, most of seam 3 modules will be release, but in alpha-release, and few of them in beta.

Just my 2 cent.. ;)

Meanwhile, I think it is save for you to start developing application in seam 2. Lot of resource in this forum will help you with just to googling it. I has been developing 2 application starting from may 2009 without big problem. If you see page seam in production , there are many organization developing their apps on seam, so I think you should no worry about the community support. Most of question has been asked and solved years ago.. :D.

Btw, Arbi..

Keep in mind that the Seam team has lost two developers (CBauer and NRichards) and gained one (LBaxter).

Is it true? I know about Norman Richard (Gavin King blogged about it) but I never hear about Christian Bauer resign before.

[cash1981]

Hmm that Christian Bauer has quit is also news to me.

Anyhow, I personally am tired of the forum here. Its way too slow and it doesn't really provide the incentiv to answer questions like how stackoverflow does.

I frequently answer seam questions there, so you might want to post there if you don't get answer here.

[xsalefter.xsalefter.yahoo.com]

Anyhow, I personally am tired of the forum here.

I think not only you.. :). A lot of people waiting about how cool seam 3 is.

Btw, someone which have an access to told to the CTO (Arbi?) may talk to him that JBoss need more developer, more volunteer here. And the product release need an acceleration.

IMHO, the most interesting thing in Java EE 6 for most people is JCDI which is in their point of view is, created based on seam. Seam is the hope for Java EE to still exist, grow, and used by most java community. I can't imagine how many people will be disappointed because waiting too long for this hype.

Sorry, not to intent to judge something.. Just my 2 cent.. Again.. :D. And still, many thanks to all seam developer for creating great frameworks. Keep fight, your community is waiting.. :D..

Thanks all.

[asookazian]

Trust me, Redhat/JBoss management is well aware of all these issues.  I don't know what all their plans are however I do know that the core Seam dev engineering team and volunteers are working very diligently on Seam 3 currently.

I'll keep the stackoverflow forum tip in mind, thx.