SEAM2 to SEAM3 migration or wait for DeltaSpike

[nishant_k123]

I am trying to evaluate upgrading our SEAM 2 applications to SEAM 3. So far I have been trying to create a proof of concept making changes to our application incrementaly to see what kind of changes need to be made to work with CDI/SEAM3. While this has not been entirely easy, I am begining to get a better feel for SEAM3. However my question is - Is it worthwhile trying to upgrade to SEAM 3 given that SEAM3 is no longer going to be developed (I have read that SEAM 3.2 will be the last version released) and that Apache's Delta Spike is going to essentially replace SEAM 3. To me it almost makes sense to ride with SEAM2 for a while until weld and Delta Spike are matured and migrate after that. What do some of the experts and people having experience in this recommend.

Also how come there is no mention of this transition from SEAM 3 to DeltaSpike mentioned any where on SEAM's website. I came across this information while navigating user forums. Seems like you have to part of some underground group rather than general developer community to know this information. Or did it completely miss this news ?

I have read around and not come up with definitive opinions on what current developers working on SEAM2/SEAM3/DELTASPIKE recommend. Please help me out with any information you can.

[lightguard]

We are working hard on getting Seam 2.3 finished which will bring many of the parts of Java EE 6 to Seam 2 (JSF2, JPA2 particularly). You're of course welcome to continue to stay on Seam 2, however, I would recommend evaluating DeltaSpike and core Java EE 6. As for the web site, we migrated much of the information from the old site to the user forums here, however, we haven't done a perfect job in cleaning up the old site, we're sorry.

[nishant_k123]

Thanks for the quick response.

So what I understand from this, and please correct me if i am wrong, is that generally speaking it is a better stay on seam 2 and get to seam 2.3 (rather than migrate to Seam 3) and then long term move over to CDI/Delta Spike? Sorry for all these questions and i will gladly lookup any location that you can point me to that can answer these

1. When will seam 2.3 be out and will it work on jboss 7?

2. Any word on Delta spike production ready release? I have read some places about early december.

Thanks again.

[lightguard]

nishant_k123 wrote:

Thanks for the quick response.

So what I understand from this, and please correct me if i am wrong, is that generally speaking it is a better stay on seam 2 and get to seam 2.3 (rather than migrate to Seam 3) and then long term move over to CDI/Delta Spike? Sorry for all these questions and i will gladly lookup any location that you can point me to that can answer these

1. When will seam 2.3 be out and will it work on jboss 7?

2. Any word on Delta spike production ready release? I have read some places about early december.

Thanks again.

1) We're working on it as fast as we can, yes it will work on JBoss AS 7

2) Not sure where you got that date from. All depends on what you mean by "production ready". We're still in incubator status and the API could change before 1.0

If you can move directly up to EE6 and create some of your own portable extensions to fill in the gaps that would be best, but there's no issues staying on Seam 2 then migrating up.

[hantsy]

Hi Jason,

I noticed maybe Seam 2.3 is ready for realase now, the examples we expected has an ee6 edtion now.  Is possible packaging the seam 2 application as ee6 war package format(I remember I filed such an issue on Seam 2 jira)? I means putting all files into a war package, including EJB(local none interface), JSF facets page, Seam etc. I know in a seam2 app, we must package them into a EAR if we use EJB.

BTW, the apache DeltaSpike is focuing on JSE, and some extra JEE features is on the way, such as transaction, secuirty, but I can not find any plan of the JSF extension support.

[lightguard]

You can package everything inside of a war for Seam 2, provided you're running on AS7 or EAP6.

DeltaSpike will have the JSF unit in v0.4 (which we'll start working on as soon as we get v0.3 out the door.... I know it's taking a while)

[nishant_k123]

I have one more question. i see that there are ways to migrate a SEAM 2.2 application to jboss 7 by correctly configuring the classloader options (https://docs.jboss.org/author/display/AS71/Seam+2+Booking+EAR+Migration+of+Binaries+-+Step+by+Step). i was wondering if people have had experiences doing this successfully and how reliable is this option? I have gone through some forums and it seams like people have dealt with a few issues trying to achieve this. Seems like the most cost effective way to get to jboss 7 if one is on SEAM 2.2. Is there possibly a listing of JIRA tickets that might be related to this ?

[rsmeral]

You can also check out the JBoss Developer Guide and its section about migration of  applications to JBoss 7: https://docs.jboss.org/author/display/AS71/Developer+Guide#DeveloperGuide-HowdoImigratemyapplicationfromJBossAS5orAS6toJBossAS7%3F

It is quite comprehensive and contains more recent information than the guide you linked. There have been many changes between JBoss 5 and 7  which might affect your application, including changes to classloading, data sources, JNDI, persistence, caching, JAX-WS, ...

[nishant_k123]

i understand that there is documentation out there. i was wondering if somedody has first hand experience attempting this or heard from someone who has done this. and what the seam guys themselves have to say about this. It would be nice to hear of some real world experience and potential issues encountered if any. From my experience having documentation on this is one thing and actually implementing this is another, especially for this kind of migration.

[tdsproule]

We are in the process of upgrading from Seam 2.2.2 on AS7 to Seam 2.3.0 (currently still at CR1) - with the view that 2.3.0 has better integration with AS7 (AS7 is great by the way).  There seemed to be some rough edges of running Seam 2.2.2 on AS7.  This would put us in a good position for eventual migration to DeltaSpike when it is as feature rich as Seam 2.  This has been a very difficult migration, principally around the upgrade from Richfaces 3.x to 4.2.2.  There have been lots of Richfaces tag name, attribute, usage & styling CSS changes that have caused a lot of rework.  Richfaces 4 has been a pain.  Some of the Seam tags have been removed and replaced by standard JSF tags.  There was some (easy'ish) work on changing hibernate validate annotations to standard JSR303 tags.  I'm beginning to wonder if it has been worth it.  But we are almost there - there are some JPA2 features that we wish to take advantage of.  Seam 3 - although interesting, does not (yet?) have all of the features of Seam 2 - so we're holding off and have decided to wait on DeltaSpike.

[teacurran]

I sucessfully got two sites that were running seam 2.2 up and running on AS7. One was previously on Jboss 5.1 and one was running on 6.0.  Unfortunatley I didn't document all of the issues that came up but it worked out being a few days of staring the server, waiting for a stack trace, then trying to figure out what caused it.  I think the hardest part was just figuring out what is loading from within the applicaiton and what is loading from the AS7 modules.  If you have someone who knows how to read errors and use google it shouldn't be any harder than upgrading from JBoss5 to JBoss6.

Incedentally, we have since upgraded a few projects to use Seam3. The biggest issues here are going from Facelets to JSF2 (lot of tedious changes) and the fact that the mail module works totally different than in Seam 2.

[ibrewster]

Hi Todd

We are also looking at migration and were considering Seam 3 but my general feel is that there are too many things missing that we use a lot such as EntityHome, EntityQuery, nested conversations etc. Just wanted to clarify something - are you running RichFaces 4 with Seam 2.3.0 (now Final)?

Thanks

[lightguard]

If you're comfortable with the Seam 2 model and don't want to learn CDI right away, or if you have other parts of your application which rely on Seam 2 (like mail or nested conversations) stick with Seam 2.3. It's a stepping stone to get you on to Java EE 6 eventually.

[tdsproule]

Hi Ian,

We are running Richfaces 4 with Seam 2.3.0.Final - although we are still working on the upgrade from 2.2.2. As I said in my previous post, we have found the 2.3.0 upgrade very problematical - mostly related to substantial Richfaces 4 component semantic & css styling changes. Grr..  We also have been having strange problems with @DataModelSelection injection not working. We are sticking with it since 2.3.0 has JSF2 & JPA2 support and seems like a natural upgrade path to eventually either Seam3 or DeltaSpike.

I did come across this package that promises EntityHome/EntityQuery support for Seam 3 - I haven't tried it out, but it might be give us more upgrade options?

http://blog.it-crowd.com.pl/2012/02/seam3-persistence-framework-comes-to_28.html

[ibrewster]

Thanks for that Todd, very useful. We are contemplating going to PrimeFaces with a re-design of our most used ui pages and can live with a half and half look-and-feel for a while so we might not have too much pain (here's hoping).

Once again thanks very much - finding out the issues with these upgrades is way way too difficult though!

Ian