Jboss Seam 2.0: Wait for it

A few weeks ago, I decided to give Jboss Seam a spin to see if I could RAD myself an application for a Playstation 3 moonlighting challenge I was doing. I was relying on Seam’s “Sean-Gen” tool to knock this one out of the park for me. It didn’t. Buying the Seam book by Yuan, becoming a permanent fixture in #seam and posting on the Seam forum was all for nothing. The problem may have been that I didn’t use the stable 1.2.x version but instead jumped right in to the latest beta 1 release of Seam 2.0. I like shiny new sh**, sue me.

There were a lot of changes between 1.x and 2.x making the version number change a valid one. In theory I was supposed to be a few commands to with their command line tool (seam setup, seam new-project, seam generate-entities, seam explode) to get up and running with a CRUD app in no time. I guess I was kind of hoping to get away with setting up the initial app without knowing much about JSF and EJB3. Even though I got many errors and ultimately, the app never ran correctly, I will say that Seam does do an excellent job of abstracting the JSF plumbing. It does help, however, if one is very familiar with the EJB3 spec and the way that Jboss implements it.I learned a lot about that stuff, so it was not a total loss.

Though in it’s current form, Seam-Gen was not able to help me meet my RAD challenge, I will try out the next few releases to see if I can build a CRUD app from an existing database as one is supposed to be able to do in Ruby on Rails. Which, for some reason, I still refuse to do.

Anywayz,

GJ