1 2 Previous Next 18 Replies Latest reply on Apr 20, 2009 12:35 AM by cfraser.reg.hill-labs.co.nz

    Learn Seam or ASP.NET? Good place to ask I know :-)

    cfraser.reg.hill-labs.co.nz
      Hi all,

      First up, long post, sorry for that, and also I know that asking this question on this forum will probably get some pretty biased answers... that's Ok, otherwise I wouldn't ask :-).

      I am truly at a bit of a cross roads. I lead a team of 3 developers. We are not dot Net developers, nor do we have lots of experience in Java. Our main development tool thus far has been Borland/CodeGear Delphi, but now it is time to choose between the two... java/jsf/seam and C# ASP.Net

      I have played around with JSF and Facelets a bit, and the other guys have also done a little bit of Java a while ago...

      My first opinion on playing with Java/Eclipse/JSF/JBoss Tools and Facelets was wow, this is cool... much better environment than Delphi... especially for the web stuff.

      The other day I thought I should check out the other side, and downloaded MS Visio Studio... so far I like the feel of Eclipse better, but it is only early days, but I did also get that 'Wow this is even easier' feeling compared to JSF/etc...

      From download to go, having a button on a form updating a text control was easy... Changing the C# code and saving, flicking back to IE page, hit the button and, what, wow, some type of hot deployment going on, this is feeling pretty cool.

      We now need to choose what direction we will take going forward. I would say there is a little bit of pressure to go MS as most local developer companies around here are MS based, some Java a couple of hours away, but have not found any Seam users close by... I am considering this as we may use another company to give us a jump in the right direction with our latest web project.

      The little play with Visual Studio was interesting but trivial.

      I would love to hear from someone experienced in both .net and java/jsf/seam/etc. Not sure if anyone is lurking here with that experience, but I would love some opinions.

      We have Linux servers mostly, and I am sitting on a Mac writing this, but cross platform is not a definite necessity, be nice, but not a requirement. If it was, it would surly push us along the Java path.

      I have had a good Google, and have not found any good comparisons of the web frameworks, happy to also take pointers on where else to look.

      Again, sorry for the long post, and thanks to those who have managed to read through it :-)

      Regards
      Colin
        • 1. Re: Learn Seam or ASP.NET? Good place to ask I know :-)
          nickarls

          .NET is not going away anywhere soon (if nothing strange happens to MS) and I've understood that Visual Studio is a killer IDE. From one point of view, considering your experience, you might have a less bumpy road in the beginning going the .NET route since there are less ways of doing things and the ways are more tightly glued together. On the other hand, when you have more experience you might need more alternatives.


          So it's basically: Do you want your pain now or later? ;-)

          • 2. Re: Learn Seam or ASP.NET? Good place to ask I know :-)
            luke.poldo.mailinator.com

            After 1 year of Seam...IMHO I don't feel to recommend it to you.
            The facts are many, little community, almost 0 tutorials, anyone blogs about it, ...


            Read this topic and do your considerations:
            http://www.seamframework.org/Community/SeamInProfessionalUse

            • 3. Re: Learn Seam or ASP.NET? Good place to ask I know :-)
              oguzyalcin.oguzhanyalcin.gazi.edu.tr

              Hi,


              Last year I've been exactly at the same point with you. When we've finished the system analyze procedures and other stuff we started discussing the language. (PHP,ASP.NET,JSF) We've eleminated PHP quickly (I was sad:)) We took jsf in one hand and asp.net on the other. Wrote down the advantages and disadvantages. All of the team have developed applications using java and c# . But no one was professional at neither jsf nor asp.net.  After a week of discussion we choose asp.net, because the learning curve in ASP.NEt(with the help of IDE) seemed better against jsf and finding a .net developer is easier (and also cheaper) than java. We finished the development really in a short manner. Everything worked well. But after all, we went to a course with subject Developing RIA with java. The problems we've faced during asp.net development has already been solved by java community.(Specially ajax) And now I'm  developing RIA with jsf  at another company. I feel comfortable and I'm happy. .Net community can be bigger than seam's. But not java. If you encounter a problem with richfaces go richfaces forum (They are  really fast indeed).  If you encounter  a problem with jsf there are lots of jsf forums. If you have a problem with seam integration here is our little (hopefully growing)seam  forum full with good people.


              As answer to Nicklas I wish if only I've desired the pain on year earlier.


              Good Luck in your choice

              • 4. Re: Learn Seam or ASP.NET? Good place to ask I know :-)
                nickarls

                Fortunately for us, we have your input ;-)

                • 5. Re: Learn Seam or ASP.NET? Good place to ask I know :-)
                  kukeltje.ronald.jbpm.org

                  Besides the fact that I have no (ASP).NET knowledge, I agree with Oguzhan. The title of this topic is already wrong. It's not Seam vs (ASP).NET, it's not Java vs (ASP).NET it's much broader and each of the frameworks has it's own community. .Net devs cheaper? maybe, but with the same level of qualification? YMMV (as did ours)


                  In that reagard I also do not like the reference to the topic about the professional use. If someone wants to rant, open your own blog. You could also state that maybe there are few companies who have seam developers 'on the bench' since it is so easy to use, lots of companies can develop applications with their own devs (not saying that it true, but it is as true as any other statement that lags motivation)


                  No pain, no gain...

                  • 6. Re: Learn Seam or ASP.NET? Good place to ask I know :-)
                    pgmjsd

                    Luke Simon wrote on Apr 16, 2009 08:38:


                    After 1 year of Seam...IMHO I don't feel to recommend it to you.
                    The facts are many, little community, almost 0 tutorials, anyone blogs about it, ...

                    Read this topic and do your considerations:
                    http://www.seamframework.org/Community/SeamInProfessionalUse


                    Maybe I'm a little weird, but:


                    Community?  It's been sufficient for my needs.  A large community usually means the quality of the community forums, etc goes down, not up.  This is based on my personal experience with the Hibernate community.


                    Tutorials?  1) Look at the examples!   I learned almost everything from the examples in the Seam distribution.  2) Get a book, man!  Java Persistence with Hibernate has a section on Seam, and JBoss Seam (Yuan, Heute) covers lots of things.   Also, you can use Seam Gen and look at the source code it generates.


                    Blogs? Most are full of disinformation.   I didn't need any blogs to figure out Seam.  


                    In production use?  Seam is relatively new, so of course it's not going to be everywhere.   We have a production system that handles over one million web requests per day for over a year now.   Pretty good for a relatively new thing.



                    So, I don't think these are legitimate reasons for not learning Seam.   I have experienced Seam to be a very good fit for developers that already have experience with other Java frameworks and/or Java Enterprise.  


                    Developers that have little or no Java Enterprise experience will have a higher learning curve (mostly Java Enterprise itself), so Seam may not be the way to go for them, at least initially.  PHP, for example, might be good enough.





                    • 7. Re: Learn Seam or ASP.NET? Good place to ask I know :-)
                      gonorrhea

                      I've been doing professional JEE development using the JBoss AS on Windows for almost 4 yrs and recently 2 yrs with Seam stack (facelets, JSF, EJB3, Seam, JPA, Hibernate, JBDS, EAP, JBoss-WS, etc.).


                      This is a better time to start learning and using Seam than it was 2 yrs ago.  The learning curve for this technology is very high, esp. if you don't already have knowledge/experience with Hibernate or JSF, for example.  AFAIK, there still is no advanced Seam course available from Redhat.


                      The tutorials that ship with the Seam distro (e.g. hotel booking) are very helpful when you are first learning.  There are some very good books available now on Seam and Richfaces.  The reference documentation for Seam is very good as well.


                      Unfortunately, and irrespective of what the Seam core devs may wish/say, the industry adoption of Seam is very weak.  I will not elaborate on this point.


                      I don't have professional experience with (ASP).NET but I have a feeling it would be much easier to learn and start developing/testing/debugging, etc. than Seam.  I have seen the latest VS .NET Studio IDE and it is very cool with very helpful videos available for setup, starting apps, etc.


                      I encourage you to evaluate both tech stacks as well as Spring (which does have very strong community adoption and deployments in production).


                      You should do a gap analysis on features (e.g. Seam offers conversation scope and jBPM integration with business process scope) as well as support plans and costs, SLAs, clustering, etc.


                      JBoss/Redhat CSP (customer support portal) needs some very heavy re-design and improvement.


                      And once you've made a decision, try to stick with it for a long time, if possible.  We are going thru a .NET to Java transition and it's very painful. 


                      I've spent dozens of hours every month doing research and experimenting with the API, etc. in order to learn how to use the design patterns and tools available in the stack.  This is for simple CRUD apps, no web services or jBPM, so that's even worse.


                      The comment about the RF forum response time and consistency I agree with.  This forum needs significant improvement in many areas.


                      The main advantage with the Java platform over .NET is that it's OS-platform agnostic (write once, run anywhere.)  If you have multiple OS to deploy your apps to, then Java gives you some advantage.


                      There are very few professionally-experienced Seam devs out there.  Keep that in mind when you decide on a stack and start hiring.  .NET and Spring don't have that problem.


                      Good luck and watch out for Web Beans (Java Contexts and DI) in EE 6...

                      • 8. Re: Learn Seam or ASP.NET? Good place to ask I know :-)
                        pgmjsd

                        This is a better time to start learning and using Seam than it was 2 yrs ago.  The learning curve for this technology is very high, esp. if you don't already have knowledge/experience with Hibernate or JSF, for example.


                        I've watched several developers that had experience with older stacks (Spring/Struts/EJB2) learn Seam very quickly.   The biggest hurdles were getting used to JSF and conversation scope.



                        • 9. Re: Learn Seam or ASP.NET? Good place to ask I know :-)
                          nickarls

                          I agree that RedHat/JBoss needs to step up the marketing latest at the point where Seam3 goes GA. There is little use in having a great framework if nobody/few are aware it exists! :-)

                          • 10. Re: Learn Seam or ASP.NET? Good place to ask I know :-)
                            gonorrhea

                            Joshua Davis wrote on Apr 16, 2009 21:03:


                            I've watched several developers that had experience with older stacks (Spring/Struts/EJB2) learn Seam very quickly.   The biggest hurdles were getting used to JSF and conversation scope.


                            I concur: JSF, Richfaces, bijection, SMPC and conversation scope.  Learning the JSF life cycle and the Seam life cycle and interceptors and filters, when/why to use SAF (Seam Application Framework with EntityHome, EntityQuery, etc.)


                            When/how to integrate stored procs b/c JPA does not support them (Hibernate does).  So use JDBC?  Or simply reverse engineer the db schema and go from there?


                            IMHO Seam is a good patch for missing stuff in EE 5 and is a prototype for the architecture/design for JSR299.

                            • 11. Re: Learn Seam or ASP.NET? Good place to ask I know :-)
                              gonorrhea

                              Nicklas Karlsson wrote on Apr 16, 2009 21:50:


                              I agree that RedHat/JBoss needs to step up the marketing latest at the point where Seam3 goes GA. There is little use in having a great framework if nobody/few are aware it exists! :-)


                              How bout some cheap ($75) half-day Seam training?


                              check this out from SpringSource: My Link


                              I am attending this one...

                              • 12. Re: Learn Seam or ASP.NET? Good place to ask I know :-)
                                gonorrhea

                                Nicklas Karlsson wrote on Apr 16, 2009 21:50:


                                I agree that RedHat/JBoss needs to step up the marketing latest at the point where Seam3 goes GA. There is little use in having a great framework if nobody/few are aware it exists! :-)

                                It's pretty sad actually b/c I know that the Seam core devs are working very hard (and JBoss project leads, like Max Anderson, are very helpful in general).


                                I'm not sure what Redhat/JBoss master plans are, but the marketing does seem to be very poor.  Also, the CSP website is horrible.  No code or quote tags, very slow perforamce (from California anyways), no sorting, no folders, just plain horrible for a customer support website.  Redhat CSP management said they'll re-do it in a year or two.  That's too long...


                                • 13. Re: Learn Seam or ASP.NET? Good place to ask I know :-)
                                  joblini

                                  I have worked with Java EE, Seam and with .NET.


                                  Neither framework is simple once you get past the simple demos and start developing a real world application.  If you are used to using Delphi in a Client-Server architecture, you will probably be shocked by how difficult it is to develop a rich application for the web.


                                  Considering Visual Studio and Eclipse: there is no contest when you consider the price and quality.  The same goes for all the other software you will need - servers, frameworks, libraries, components, tools, etc.  The Java community offers, for the most part at no cost. an incredible wealth of software, knowledge and innovation.  With .NET, everything you want to do seems to involve buying something. 


                                  But its not only about the cost of getting equipped, it is, more importantly, how do you want to position the product you will be developing?


                                  If you are developing an Intranet and targeting only companies that are heavily invested in Microsoft infrastructure (servers, software etc.) .NET might be a better choice. 


                                  On the other hand, if you are developing a standards-based, open, enterprise application or Internet application, Java is the clear choice, and Seam is probably the best framework available.


                                  • 14. Re: Learn Seam or ASP.NET? Good place to ask I know :-)
                                    mivasko

                                    In my (very biased) opinion, perhaps Eclipse is also a part of the problem. NetBeans is so much better. But unfortunately no JBoss Tools for it...

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