<s:link> and <s:button>Seam is an application framework for Enterprise Java. It is inspired by the following principles:
Seam defines a uniform component model for all business logic in your application. A Seam component may be stateful, with the state associated with any one of several well-defined contexts, including the long-running, persistent, business process context and the conversation context, which is preserved across multiple web requests in a user interaction.
There is no distinction between presentation tier components and business logic components in Seam. You can layer your application according to whatever architecture you devise, rather than being forced to shoehorn your application logic into an unnatural layering scheme forced upon you by whatever combination of stovepipe frameworks you're using today.
Unlike plain Java EE or J2EE components, Seam components may simultaneously access state associated with the web request and state held in transactional resources (without the need to propagate web request state manually via method parameters). You might object that the application layering imposed upon you by the old J2EE platform was a Good Thing. Well, nothing stops you creating an equivalent layered architecture using Seam — the difference is that you get to architect your own application and decide what the layers are and how they work together.
JSF and EJB 3.0 are two of the best new features of Java EE 5. EJB3 is a brand new component model for server side business and persistence logic. Meanwhile, JSF is a great component model for the presentation tier. Unfortunately, neither component model is able to solve all problems in computing by itself. Indeed, JSF and EJB3 work best used together. But the Java EE 5 specification provides no standard way to integrate the two component models. Fortunately, the creators of both models foresaw this situation and provided standard extension points to allow extension and integration with other frameworks.
Seam unifies the component models of JSF and EJB3, eliminating glue code, and letting the developer think about the business problem.
It is possible to write Seam applications where "everything" is an EJB. This may come as a surprise if you're used to thinking of EJBs as coarse-grained, so-called "heavyweight" objects. However, version 3.0 has completely changed the nature of EJB from the point of view of the developer. An EJB is a fine-grained object — nothing more complex than an annotated JavaBean. Seam even encourages you to use session beans as JSF action listeners!
On the other hand, if you prefer not to adopt EJB 3.0 at this time, you don't have to. Virtually any Java class may be a Seam component, and Seam provides all the functionality that you expect from a "lightweight" container, and more, for any component, EJB or otherwise.
Seam supports the best open source JSF-based AJAX solutions: JBoss RichFaces and ICEfaces. These solutions let you add AJAX capability to your user interface without the need to write any JavaScript code.
Alternatively, Seam provides a built-in JavaScript remoting layer that lets you call components asynchronously from client-side JavaScript without the need for an intermediate action layer. You can even subscribe to server-side JMS topics and receive messages via AJAX push.
Neither of these approaches would work well, were it not for Seam's built-in concurrency and state management, which ensures that many concurrent fine-grained, asynchronous AJAX requests are handled safely and efficiently on the server side.
Optionally, Seam provides transparent business process management via jBPM. You won't believe how easy it is to implement complex workflows, collaboration and and task management using jBPM and Seam.
Seam even allows you to define presentation tier pageflow using the same language (jPDL) that jBPM uses for business process definition.
JSF provides an incredibly rich event model for the presentation tier. Seam enhances this model by exposing jBPM's business process related events via exactly the same event handling mechanism, providing a uniform event model for Seam's uniform component model.
We're all used to the concept of declarative transaction management and declarative security from the early days of EJB. EJB 3.0 even introduces declarative persistence context management. These are three examples of a broader problem of managing state that is associated with a particular context, while ensuring that all needed cleanup occurs when the context ends. Seam takes the concept of declarative state management much further and applies it to application state. Traditionally, J2EE applications implement state management manually, by getting and setting servlet session and request attributes. This approach to state management is the source of many bugs and memory leaks when applications fail to clean up session attributes, or when session data associated with different workflows collides in a multi-window application. Seam has the potential to almost entirely eliminate this class of bugs.
Declarative application state management is made possible by the richness of the context model defined by Seam. Seam extends the context model defined by the servlet spec — request, session, application — with two new contexts — conversation and business process — that are more meaningful from the point of view of the business logic.
You'll be amazed at how many things become easier once you start using conversations.
Have you ever suffered pain dealing with lazy association fetching in an ORM solution
like Hibernate or JPA? Seam's conversation-scoped persistence contexts mean you'll
rarely have to see a LazyInitializationException. Have you ever
had problems with the refresh button? The back button? With duplicate form submission?
With propagating messages across a post-then-redirect? Seam's conversation management
solves these problems without you even needing to really think about them. They're all
symptoms of the broken state management architecture that has been prevalent since the
earliest days of the web.
The notion of Inversion of Control or dependency injection exists in both JSF and EJB3, as well as in numerous so-called "lightweight containers". Most of these containers emphasize injection of components that implement stateless services. Even when injection of stateful components is supported (such as in JSF), it is virtually useless for handling application state because the scope of the stateful component cannot be defined with sufficient flexibility, and because components belonging to wider scopes may not be injected into components belonging to narrower scopes.
Bijection differs from IoC in that it is dynamic, contextual, and bidirectional. You can think of it as a mechanism for aliasing contextual variables (names in the various contexts bound to the current thread) to attributes of the component. Bijection allows auto-assembly of stateful components by the container. It even allows a component to safely and easily manipulate the value of a context variable, just by assigning it to an attribute of the component.
Seam applications let the user freely switch between multiple browser tabs, each associated with a different, safely isolated, conversation. Applications may even take advantage of workspace management, allowing the user to switch between conversations (workspaces) in a single browser tab. Seam provides not only correct multi-window operation, but also multi-window-like operation in a single window!
Traditionally, the Java community has been in a state of deep confusion about precisely what kinds of meta-information counts as configuration. J2EE and popular "lightweight" containers have provided XML-based deployment descriptors both for things which are truly configurable between different deployments of the system, and for any other kinds or declaration which can not easily be expressed in Java. Java 5 annotations changed all this.
EJB 3.0 embraces annotations and "configuration by exception" as the easiest way to provide information to the container in a declarative form. Unfortunately, JSF is still heavily dependent on verbose XML configuration files. Seam extends the annotations provided by EJB 3.0 with a set of annotations for declarative state management and declarative context demarcation. This lets you eliminate the noisy JSF managed bean declarations and reduce the required XML to just that information which truly belongs in XML (the JSF navigation rules).
Seam components, being plain Java classes, are by nature unit testable. But for complex applications, unit testing alone is insufficient. Integration testing has traditionally been a messy and difficult task for Java web applications. Therefore, Seam provides for testability of Seam applications as a core feature of the framework. You can easily write JUnit or TestNG tests that reproduce a whole interaction with a user, exercising all components of the system apart from the view (the JSP or Facelets page). You can run these tests directly inside your IDE, where Seam will automatically deploy EJB components using JBoss Embedded.
We think the latest incarnation of Java EE is great. But we know it's never going to be perfect. Where there are holes in the specifications (for example, limitations in the JSF lifecycle for GET requests), Seam fixes them. And the authors of Seam are working with the JCP expert groups to make sure those fixes make their way back into the next revision of the standards.
Today's web frameworks think too small. They let you get user input off a form and into your Java objects. And then they leave you hanging. A truly complete web application framework should address problems like persistence, concurrency, asynchronicity, state management, security, email, messaging, PDF and chart generation, workflow, wikitext rendering, webservices, caching and more. Once you scratch the surface of Seam, you'll be amazed at how many problems become simpler...
Seam integrates JPA and Hibernate3 for persistence, the EJB Timer Service and Quartz for lightweight asychronicity, jBPM for workflow, JBoss Rules for business rules, Meldware Mail for email, Hibernate Search and Lucene for full text search, JMS for messaging and JBoss Cache for page fragment caching. Seam layers an innovative rule-based security framework over JAAS and JBoss Rules. There's even JSF tag libraries for rendering PDF, outgoing email, charts and wikitext. Seam components may be called synchronously as a Web Service, asynchronously from client-side JavaScript or Google Web Toolkit or, of course, directly from JSF.
Seam works in any Java EE application server, and even works in Tomcat. If your environment supports EJB 3.0, great! If it doesn't, no problem, you can use Seam's built-in transaction management with JPA or Hibernate3 for persistence. Or, you can deploy JBoss Embedded in Tomcat, and get full support for EJB 3.0.

It turns out that the combination of Seam, JSF and EJB3 is the simplest way to write a complex web application in Java. You won't believe how little code is required!
Visit SeamFramework.org to find out how to contribute to Seam!
Seam provides a number of example applications demonstrating how to use the various features
of Seam. This tutorial will guide you through a few of those examples to help you get started
learning Seam. The Seam examples are located in the examples subdirectory
of the Seam distribution. The registration example, which will be the first example we look at,
is in the examples/registration directory.
Each example has the same directory structure:
The view directory contains view-related files such as
web page templates, images and stylesheets.
The resources directory contains deployment descriptors and
other configuration files.
The src directory contains the application source code.
The example applications run both on JBoss AS and Tomcat with no additional configuration.
The following sections will explain the procedure in both cases. Note that all the examples
are built and run from the Ant build.xml, so you'll need a recent version
of Ant installed before you get started.
The examples are configured for use on JBoss AS 4.2 or 5.0. You'll need to set jboss.home,
in the shared build.properties file in the root folder of your Seam
installation, to the location of your JBoss AS installation.
Once you've set the location of JBoss AS and started the application server, you can build and deploy
any example by typing ant explode in the the directory for that example. Any example
that is packaged as an EAR deploys to a URL like
/seam-, where exampleexample is
the name of the example folder, with one exception. If the example folder begins with seam, the prefix
"seam" is ommitted. For instance, if JBoss AS is running on port 8080, the URL for the registration
example is
http://localhost:8080/seam-registration/, whereas the URL for the seamspace
example is
http://localhost:8080/seam-space/.
If, on the other hand, the example gets packaged as a WAR, then it deploys to a URL like
/jboss-seam-. Most of the examples can be deployed as a WAR
to Tomcat with Embedded JBoss by typing exampleant tomcat.deploy. Several of the examples
can only be deployed as a WAR. Those examples are groovybooking, hibernate, jpa, and spring.
The examples are also configured for use on Tomcat 6.0. You will need to follow the instructions in Section 30.6.1, “Installing Embedded JBoss” for installing JBoss Embedded on Tomcat 6.0. JBoss Embedded is only required to run the Seam demos that use EJB3 components on Tomcat. There are also examples of non-EJB3 applications that can be run on Tomcat without the use of JBoss Embedded.
You'll need to
set tomcat.home, in the shared build.properties file in
the root folder of your Seam installation, to the location of your Tomcat installation.
make sure you set the location of your Tomcat.
You'll need to use a different Ant target when using Tomcat. Use
ant tomcat.deploy in example subdirectory to build and deploy
any example for Tomcat.
On Tomcat, the examples deploy to URLs like
/jboss-seam-, so for the registration
example the URL would be
examplehttp://localhost:8080/jboss-seam-registration/. The same is true
for examples that deploy as a WAR, as mentioned in the previous section.
Most of the examples come with a suite of TestNG integration tests. The easiest way to run the tests is
to run ant test. It is also possible to run the tests inside your IDE using the
TestNG plugin. Consult the readme.txt in the examples directory of the Seam distribution for more
information.
The registration example is a simple application that lets a new user store his username, real name and password in the database. The example isn't intended to show off all of the cool functionality of Seam. However, it demonstrates the use of an EJB3 session bean as a JSF action listener, and basic configuration of Seam.
We'll go slowly, since we realize you might not yet be familiar with EJB 3.0.
The start page displays a very basic form with three input fields. Try filling them in and then submitting the form. This will save a user object in the database.

The example is implemented with two Facelets templates, one entity bean and one stateless session bean. Let's take a look at the code, starting from the "bottom".
We need an EJB entity bean for user data. This class defines persistence and validation declaratively, via annotations. It also needs some extra annotations that define the class as a Seam component.
Example 1.1. User.java
@Entity
@Name("user")
@Scope(SESSION)
@Table(name="users")
public class User implements Serializable
{
private static final long serialVersionUID = 1881413500711441951L;
private String username;
private String password;
private String name;
public User(String name, String password, String username)
{
this.name = name;
this.password = password;
this.username = username;
}
public User() {}
@NotNull @Length(min=5, max=15)
public String getPassword()
{
return password;
}
public void setPassword(String password)
{
this.password = password;
}
@NotNull
public String getName()
{
return name;
}
public void setName(String name)
{
this.name = name;
}
@Id @NotNull @Length(min=5, max=15)
public String getUsername()
{
return username;
}
public void setUsername(String username)
{
this.username = username;
}
}
![]() | The EJB3 standard |
![]() | A Seam component needs a component name specified by the
|
![]() | Whenever Seam instantiates a component, it binds the new instance to a context
variable in the component's default context. The default
context is specified using the
|
![]() | The EJB standard |
![]() |
|
![]() | An empty constructor is both required by both the EJB specification and by Seam. |
![]() | The |
![]() | The EJB standard |
The most important things to notice in this example are the @Name and
@Scope annotations. These annotations establish that this class is a Seam component.
We'll see below that the properties of our User class are bound
directly to JSF components and are populated by JSF during the update model values phase. We
don't need any tedious glue code to copy data back and forth between the JSP pages and the
entity bean domain model.
However, entity beans shouldn't do transaction management or database access. So we can't use this component as a JSF action listener. For that we need a session bean.
Most Seam application use session beans as JSF action listeners (you can use JavaBeans instead if you like).
We have exactly one JSF action in our application, and one session bean method attached to it. In
this case, we'll use a stateless session bean, since all the state associated with our action is
held by the User bean.
This is the only really interesting code in the example!
Example 1.2. RegisterAction.java
@Stateless@Name("register") public class RegisterAction implements Register { @In private Use
r user; @PersistenceContext private Ent
ityManager em; @Logger private Log
log; public String register() {
List existing = em.createQuery( "select username from User where username = #{user.username}") .getR
esultList(); if (existing.size()==0) { em.persist(user); log.info("Registered new user #{user.username}"); retur
n "/registered.xhtml"; }
else { FacesMessages.instance().add("User #{user.username} already exists"); retur
n null; } } }
![]() | The EJB |
![]() | The
|
![]() | The EJB standard |
![]() | The Seam |
![]() | The action listener method uses the standard EJB3
|
![]() | Notice that Seam lets you use a JSF EL expression inside EJB-QL. Under the
covers, this results in an ordinary JPA |
![]() | The |
![]() | JSF action listener methods return a string-valued outcome that determines what page will be displayed next. A null outcome (or a void action listener method) redisplays the previous page. In plain JSF, it is normal to always use a JSF navigation rule to determine the JSF view id from the outcome. For complex application this indirection is useful and a good practice. However, for very simple examples like this one, Seam lets you use the JSF view id as the outcome, eliminating the requirement for a navigation rule. Note that when you use a view id as an outcome, Seam always performs a browser redirect. |
![]() | Seam provides a number of built-in components to help solve
common problems. The |
Note that we did not explicitly specify a @Scope this time. Each Seam
component type has a default scope if not explicitly specified. For stateless session beans, the
default scope is the stateless context, which is the only sensible value.
Our session bean action listener performs the business and persistence logic for our mini-application. In more complex applications, we might need require a separate service layer. This is easy to achieve with Seam, but it's overkill for most web applications. Seam does not force you into any particular strategy for application layering, allowing your application to be as simple, or as complex, as you want.
Note that in this simple application, we've actually made it far more complex than it needs to be. If we had used the Seam application framework controllers, we would have eliminated all of our application code. However, then we wouldn't have had much of an application to explain.
Naturally, our session bean needs a local interface.
That's the end of the Java code. Now we'll look at the view.
The view pages for a Seam application could be implemented using any technology that supports JSF. In this example we use Facelets, because we think it's better than JSP.
Example 1.4. register.xhtml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns:s="http://jboss.com/products/seam/taglib"
xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html"
xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core">
<head>
<title>Register New User</title>
</head>
<body>
<f:view>
<h:form>
<s:validateAll>
<h:panelGrid columns="2">
Username: <h:inputText value="#{user.username}" required="true"/>
Real Name: <h:inputText value="#{user.name}" required="true"/>
Password: <h:inputSecret value="#{user.password}" required="true"/>
</h:panelGrid>
</s:validateAll>
<h:messages/>
<h:commandButton value="Register" action="#{register.register}"/>
</h:form>
</f:view>
</body>
</html>
The only thing here that is specific to Seam is the
<s:validateAll> tag. This JSF component tells JSF to validate all
the contained input fields against the Hibernate Validator annotations specified on the entity bean.
Example 1.5. registered.xhtml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core">
<head>
<title>Successfully Registered New User</title>
</head>
<body>
<f:view>
Welcome, #{user.name}, you are successfully registered as #{user.username}.
</f:view>
</body>
</html>
This is a simple Facelets page using some inline EL. There's nothing specific to Seam here.
Since this is the first Seam app we've seen, we'll take a look at the deployment descriptors. Before we get into them, it is worth noting that Seam strongly values minimal configuration. These configuration files will be created for you when you create a Seam application. You'll never need to touch most of these files. We're presenting them now only to help you understand what all the pieces in the example are doing.
If you've used many Java frameworks before, you'll be used to having to declare all your component classes in some kind of XML file that gradually grows more and more unmanageable as your project matures. You'll be relieved to know that Seam does not require that application components be accompanied by XML. Most Seam applications require a very small amount of XML that does not grow very much as the project gets bigger.
Nevertheless, it is often useful to be able to provide for some external
configuration of some components (particularly the components built in to
Seam). You have a couple of options here, but the most flexible option is to provide this
configuration in a file called components.xml, located in the
WEB-INF directory. We'll use the components.xml file to tell
Seam how to find our EJB components in JNDI:
Example 1.6. components.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<components xmlns="http://jboss.com/products/seam/components"
xmlns:core="http://jboss.com/products/seam/core"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="
http://jboss.com/products/seam/core
http://jboss.com/products/seam/core-2.1.xsd
http://jboss.com/products/seam/components
http://jboss.com/products/seam/components-2.1.xsd">
<core:init jndi-pattern="@jndiPattern@"/>
</components>
This code configures a property named jndiPattern of a built-in Seam component
named org.jboss.seam.core.init. The funny @ symbols are
there because our Ant build script puts the correct JNDI pattern in when we deploy the application,
which it reads from the components.properties file. You learn more about how this process works in
Section 5.2, “Configuring components via components.xml”.
The presentation layer for our mini-application will be deployed in a WAR. So we'll need a web deployment descriptor.
Example 1.7. web.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="
http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee
http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd"
version="2.5">
<listener>
<listener-class>org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamListener</listener-class>
</listener>
<context-param>
<param-name>javax.faces.DEFAULT_SUFFIX</param-name>
<param-value>.xhtml</param-value>
</context-param>
<servlet>
<servlet-name>Faces Servlet</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>javax.faces.webapp.FacesServlet</servlet-class>
<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>Faces Servlet</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>*.seam</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
<session-config>
<session-timeout>10</session-timeout>
</session-config>
</web-app>
This web.xml file configures Seam and JSF. The configuration you see here is
pretty much identical in all Seam applications.
Most Seam applications use JSF views as the presentation layer. So usually we'll need
faces-config.xml. In our case, we are going to use Facelets for
defining our views, so we need to tell JSF to use Facelets as its templating engine.
Example 1.8. faces-config.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<faces-config xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="
http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee
http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-facesconfig_1_2.xsd"
version="1.2">
<application>
<view-handler>com.sun.facelets.FaceletViewHandler</view-handler>
</application>
</faces-config>
Note that we don't need
any JSF managed bean declarations! Our managed beans are annotated Seam components. In Seam applications,
the faces-config.xml is used much less often than in plain JSF. Here, we are simply
using it to enable Facelets as the view handler instead of JSP.
In fact, once you have all the basic descriptors set up, the only XML you need to write as you add new functionality to a Seam application is orchestration: navigation rules or jBPM process definitions. Seam's stand is that process flow and configuration data are the only things that truly belong in XML.
In this simple example, we don't even need a navigation rule, since we decided to embed the view id in our action code.
The ejb-jar.xml file integrates Seam with EJB3, by attaching the
SeamInterceptor to all session beans in the archive.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<ejb-jar xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="
http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee
http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/ejb-jar_3_0.xsd"
version="3.0">
<interceptors>
<interceptor>
<interceptor-class>org.jboss.seam.ejb.SeamInterceptor</interceptor-class>
</interceptor>
</interceptors>
<assembly-descriptor>
<interceptor-binding>
<ejb-name>*</ejb-name>
<interceptor-class>org.jboss.seam.ejb.SeamInterceptor</interceptor-class>
</interceptor-binding>
</assembly-descriptor>
</ejb-jar>
The persistence.xml file tells the EJB persistence provider where to find the
datasource, and contains some vendor-specific settings. In this case, enables automatic schema
export at startup time.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<persistence xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="
http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence
http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence/persistence_1_0.xsd"
version="1.0">
<persistence-unit name="userDatabase">
<provider>org.hibernate.ejb.HibernatePersistence</provider>
<jta-data-source>java:/DefaultDS</jta-data-source>
<properties>
<property name="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto" value="create-drop"/>
</properties>
</persistence-unit>
</persistence>
Finally, since our application is deployed as an EAR, we need a deployment descriptor there, too.
Example 1.9. registration application
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<application xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="
http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee
http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/application_5.xsd"
version="5">
<display-name>Seam Registration</display-name>
<module>
<web>
<web-uri>jboss-seam-registration.war</web-uri>
<context-root>/seam-registration</context-root>
</web>
</module>
<module>
<ejb>jboss-seam-registration.jar</ejb>
</module>
<module>
<ejb>jboss-seam.jar</ejb>
</module>
<module>
<java>jboss-el.jar</java>
</module>
</application>
This deployment descriptor links modules in the enterprise archive and binds the web application
to the context root /seam-registration.
We've now seen all the files in the entire application!
When the form is submitted, JSF asks Seam to resolve the variable named user.
Since there is no value already bound to that name (in any Seam context), Seam instantiates the
user component, and returns the resulting User entity bean
instance to JSF after storing it in the Seam session context.
The form input values are now validated against the Hibernate Validator constraints specified on the
User entity. If the constraints are violated, JSF redisplays the page. Otherwise,
JSF binds the form input values to properties of the User entity bean.
Next, JSF asks Seam to resolve the variable named register. Seam uses the JNDI
pattern mentioned earlier to locate the stateless session bean, wraps it as a Seam component, and
returns it. Seam then presents this component to JSF and JSF invokes the register()
action listener method.
But Seam is not done yet. Seam intercepts the method call and injects the User
entity from the Seam session context, before allowing the invocation to continue.
The register() method checks if a user with the entered username already exists.
If so, an error message is queued with the FacesMessages component, and a null
outcome is returned, causing a page redisplay. The FacesMessages component
interpolates the JSF expression embedded in the message string and adds a JSF
FacesMessage to the view.
If no user with that username exists, the "/registered.xhtml" outcome triggers a
browser redirect to the registered.xhtml page. When JSF comes to render the page, it
asks Seam to resolve the variable named user and uses property values of the returned
User entity from Seam's session scope.
Clickable lists of database search results are such an important part of any online application that Seam
provides special functionality on top of JSF to make it easier to query data using EJB-QL or HQL and display
it as a clickable list using a JSF <h:dataTable>. The messages example
demonstrates this functionality.

The message list example has one entity bean, Message, one session bean,
MessageListBean and one JSP.
The Message entity defines the title, text, date and time of a message, and a
flag indicating whether the message has been read:
Example 1.10. Message.java
@Entity
@Name("message")
@Scope(EVENT)
public class Message implements Serializable
{
private Long id;
private String title;
private String text;
private boolean read;
private Date datetime;
@Id @GeneratedValue
public Long getId()
{
return id;
}
public void setId(Long id)
{
this.id = id;
}
@NotNull @Length(max=100)
public String getTitle()
{
return title;
}
public void setTitle(String title)
{
this.title = title;
}
@NotNull @Lob
public String getText()
{
return text;
}
public void setText(String text)
{
this.text = text;
}
@NotNull
public boolean isRead()
{
return read;
}
public void setRead(boolean read)
{
this.read = read;
}
@NotNull
@Basic @Temporal(TemporalType.TIMESTAMP)
public Date getDatetime()
{
return datetime;
}
public void setDatetime(Date datetime)
{
this.datetime = datetime;
}
}
Just like in the previous example, we have a session bean, MessageManagerBean,
which defines the action listener methods for the two buttons on our form. One of the buttons
selects a message from the list, and displays that message. The other button deletes a message. So
far, this is not so different to the previous example.
But MessageManagerBean is also responsible for fetching the list of messages
the first time we navigate to the message list page. There are various ways the user could navigate
to the page, and not all of them are preceded by a JSF action — the user might have
bookmarked the page, for example. So the job of fetching the message list takes place in a Seam
factory method, instead of in an action listener method.
We want to cache the list of messages in memory between server requests, so we will make this a stateful session bean.
Example 1.11. MessageManagerBean.java
@Stateful
@Scope(SESSION)
@Name("messageManager")
public class MessageManagerBean implements Serializable, MessageManager
{
@DataModel
private Lis
t<Message> messageList;
@DataModelSelection
@Out(requir
ed=false)
private Mes
sage message;
@PersistenceContext(type=EXTENDED)
private Ent
ityManager em;
@Factory("messageList")
public void
findMessages()
{
messageList = em.createQuery("select msg from Message msg order by msg.datetime desc")
.getResultList();
}
public void select()
{
message.setRead(true);
}
public void delete()
{
messageList.remove(message);
em.remove(message);
message=null;
}
@Remove
public void
destroy() {}
}![]() | The |
![]() | The |
![]() | The |
![]() | This stateful bean has an EJB3 extended persistence context.
The messages retrieved in the query remain in the managed state as long as the bean
exists, so any subsequent method calls to the stateful bean can update them without
needing to make any explicit call to the |
![]() | The first time we navigate to the JSP page, there will be no value in the
|
![]() | The |
![]() | The |
![]() | All stateful session bean Seam components must have a method
with no parameters marked |
Note that this is a session-scoped Seam component. It is associated with the user login session, and all requests from a login session share the same instance of the component. (In Seam applications, we usually use session-scoped components sparingly.)
All session beans have a business interface, of course.
Example 1.12. MessageManager.java
@Local
public interface MessageManager
{
public void findMessages();
public void select();
public void delete();
public void destroy();
}
From now on, we won't show local interfaces in our code examples.
Let's skip over components.xml, persistence.xml,
web.xml, ejb-jar.xml, faces-config.xml
and application.xml since they are much the same as the previous example, and go
straight to the JSP.
The JSP page is a straightforward use of the JSF <h:dataTable>
component. Again, nothing specific to Seam.
Example 1.13. messages.jsp
<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html" prefix="h" %>
<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core" prefix="f" %>
<html>
<head>
<title>Messages</title>
</head>
<body>
<f:view>
<h:form>
<h2>Message List</h2>
<h:outputText value="No messages to display"
rendered="#{messageList.rowCount==0}"/>
<h:dataTable var="msg" value="#{messageList}"
rendered="#{messageList.rowCount>0}">
<h:column>
<f:facet name="header">
<h:outputText value="Read"/>
</f:facet>
<h:selectBooleanCheckbox value="#{msg.read}" disabled="true"/>
</h:column>
<h:column>
<f:facet name="header">
<h:outputText value="Title"/>
</f:facet>
<h:commandLink value="#{msg.title}" action="#{messageManager.select}"/>
</h:column>
<h:column>
<f:facet name="header">
<h:outputText value="Date/Time"/>
</f:facet>
<h:outputText value="#{msg.datetime}">
<f:convertDateTime type="both" dateStyle="medium" timeStyle="short"/>
</h:outputText>
</h:column>
<h:column>
<h:commandButton value="Delete" action="#{messageManager.delete}"/>
</h:column>
</h:dataTable>
<h3><h:outputText value="#{message.title}"/></h3>
<div><h:outputText value="#{message.text}"/></div>
</h:form>
</f:view>
</body>
</html>
The first time we navigate to the messages.jsp page, the page will try to resolve the
messageList context variable. Since this context variable is not initialized,
Seam will call the factory method findMessages(), which performs a query against the
database and results in a DataModel being outjected. This
DataModel provides the row data needed for rendering the
<h:dataTable>.
When the user clicks the <h:commandLink>, JSF calls the
select() action listener. Seam intercepts this call and injects the selected row
data into the message attribute of the messageManager component.
The action listener fires, marking the selected Message as read. At the end of the
call, Seam outjects the selected Message to the context variable named
message. Next, the EJB container commits the transaction, and the change to the
Message is flushed to the database. Finally, the page is re-rendered,
redisplaying the message list, and displaying the selected message below it.
If the user clicks the <h:commandButton>, JSF calls the
delete() action listener. Seam intercepts this call and injects the selected row
data into the message attribute of the messageList component. The
action listener fires, removing the selected Message from the list, and also calling
remove() on the EntityManager. At the end of the call, Seam
refreshes the messageList context variable and clears the context variable named
message. The EJB container commits the transaction, and deletes the
Message from the database. Finally, the page is re-rendered, redisplaying the
message list.
jBPM provides sophisticated functionality for workflow and task management. To get a small taste of how jBPM integrates with Seam, we'll show you a simple "todo list" application. Since managing lists of tasks is such core functionality for jBPM, there is hardly any Java code at all in this example.

The center of this example is the jBPM process definition. There are also two JSPs and two trivial JavaBeans (There was no reason to use session beans, since they do not access the database, or have any other transactional behavior). Let's start with the process definition:
Example 1.14. todo.jpdl.xml
<process-definition name="todo"> <start-state name="start"> <transition to="todo"/> </start-state> <task-node
name="todo"> <task na
me="todo" description="#{todoList.description}"> <assi
gnment actor-id="#{actor.id}"/> </task> <transition to="done"/> </task-node> <end-state
name="done"/> </process-definition>
![]() | The |
![]() | The |
![]() | The |
![]() | Tasks need to be assigned to a user or group of users when they are created. In this
case, the task is assigned to the current user, which we get from a built-in Seam
component named |
![]() | The |
If we view this process definition using the process definition editor provided by JBossIDE, this is what it looks like:

This document defines our business process as a graph of nodes. This is the most trivial possible business process: there is one task to be performed, and when that task is complete, the business process ends.
The first JavaBean handles the login screen login.jsp. Its job is just to
initialize the jBPM actor id using the actor component. In a real application, it
would also need to authenticate the user.
Example 1.15. Login.java
@Name("login")
public class Login
{
@In
private Actor actor;
private String user;
public String getUser()
{
return user;
}
public void setUser(String user)
{
this.user = user;
}
public String login()
{
actor.setId(user);
return "/todo.jsp";
}
}
Here we see the use of @In to inject the built-in Actor
component.
The JSP itself is trivial:
Example 1.16. login.jsp
<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html" prefix="h"%>
<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core" prefix="f"%>
<html>
<head>
<title>Login</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Login</h1>
<f:view>
<h:form>
<div>
<h:inputText value="#{login.user}"/>
<h:commandButton value="Login" action="#{login.login}"/>
</div>
</h:form>
</f:view>
</body>
</html>
The second JavaBean is responsible for starting business process instances, and ending tasks.
Example 1.17. TodoList.java
@Name("todoList")
public class TodoList
{
private String description;
public Stri
ng getDescription()
{
return description;
}
public void setDescription(String description)
{
this.description = description;
}
@CreateProcess(definition="todo")
public void createTodo() {}
@StartTask @EndTask
public void done() {}
}![]() | The description property accepts user input from the JSP page, and exposes it to the process definition, allowing the task description to be set. |
![]() | The Seam |
![]() | The Seam |
In a more realistic example, @StartTask and @EndTask would not
appear on the same method, because there is usually work to be done using the application in order to
complete the task.
Finally, the core of the application is in todo.jsp:
Example 1.18. todo.jsp
<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html" prefix="h" %>
<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core" prefix="f" %>
<%@ taglib uri="http://jboss.com/products/seam/taglib" prefix="s" %>
<html>
<head>
<title>Todo List</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Todo List</h1>
<f:view>
<h:form id="list">
<div>
<h:outputText value="There are no todo items."
rendered="#{empty taskInstanceList}"/>
<h:dataTable value="#{taskInstanceList}" var="task"
rendered="#{not empty taskInstanceList}">
<h:column>
<f:facet name="header">
<h:outputText value="Description"/>
</f:facet>
<h:inputText value="#{task.description}"/>
</h:column>
<h:column>
<f:facet name="header">
<h:outputText value="Created"/>
</f:facet>
<h:outputText value="#{task.taskMgmtInstance.processInstance.start}">
<f:convertDateTime type="date"/>
</h:outputText>
</h:column>
<h:column>
<f:facet name="header">
<h:outputText value="Priority"/>
</f:facet>
<h:inputText value="#{task.priority}" style="width: 30"/>
</h:column>
<h:column>
<f:facet name="header">
<h:outputText value="Due Date"/>
</f:facet>
<h:inputText value="#{task.dueDate}" style="width: 100">
<f:convertDateTime type="date" dateStyle="short"/>
</h:inputText>
</h:column>
<h:column>
<s:button value="Done" action="#{todoList.done}" taskInstance="#{task}"/>
</h:column>
</h:dataTable>
</div>
<div>
<h:messages/>
</div>
<div>
<h:commandButton value="Update Items" action="update"/>
</div>
</h:form>
<h:form id="new">
<div>
<h:inputText value="#{todoList.description}"/>
<h:commandButton value="Create New Item" action="#{todoList.createTodo}"/>
</div>
</h:form>
</f:view>
</body>
</html>
Let's take this one piece at a time.
The page renders a list of tasks, which it gets from a built-in Seam component named
taskInstanceList. The list is defined inside a JSF form.
Example 1.19. todo.jsp
<h:form id="list">
<div>
<h:outputText value="There are no todo items." rendered="#{empty taskInstanceList}"/>
<h:dataTable value="#{taskInstanceList}" var="task"
rendered="#{not empty taskInstanceList}">
...
</h:dataTable>
</div>
</h:form>
Each element of the list is an instance of the jBPM class TaskInstance. The
following code simply displays the interesting properties of each task in the list. For the description,
priority and due date, we use input controls, to allow the user to update these values.
<h:column>
<f:facet name="header">
<h:outputText value="Description"/>
</f:facet>
<h:inputText value="#{task.description}"/>
</h:column>
<h:column>
<f:facet name="header">
<h:outputText value="Created"/>
</f:facet>
<h:outputText value="#{task.taskMgmtInstance.processInstance.start}">
<f:convertDateTime type="date"/>
</h:outputText>
</h:column>
<h:column>
<f:facet name="header">
<h:outputText value="Priority"/>
</f:facet>
<h:inputText value="#{task.priority}" style="width: 30"/>
</h:column>
<h:column>
<f:facet name="header">
<h:outputText value="Due Date"/>
</f:facet>
<h:inputText value="#{task.dueDate}" style="width: 100">
<f:convertDateTime type="date" dateStyle="short"/>
</h:inputText>
</h:column>
#{task.dueDate}. This button ends the task by calling the action method annotated @StartTask
@EndTask. It passes the task id to Seam as a request parameter:
<h:column>
<s:button value="Done" action="#{todoList.done}" taskInstance="#{task}"/>
</h:column>
Note that this is using a Seam <s:button> JSF control from the
seam-ui.jar package. This button is used to update the properties of the
tasks. When the form is submitted, Seam and jBPM will make any changes to the tasks persistent.
There is no need for any action listener method:
<h:commandButton value="Update Items" action="update"/>
A second form on the page is used to create new items, by calling the action method annotated
@CreateProcess.
<h:form id="new">
<div>
<h:inputText value="#{todoList.description}"/>
<h:commandButton value="Create New Item" action="#{todoList.createTodo}"/>
</div>
</h:form>
After logging in, todo.jsp uses the taskInstanceList component to display a table
of outstanding todo items for a the current user. Initially there are none. It
also presents a form to enter a new entry. When the user types the todo item and
hits the "Create New Item" button, #{todoList.createTodo} is called. This starts
the todo process, as defined in todo.jpdl.xml.
The process instance is created, starting in the start state and immediately transition to
the todo state, where a new task is created. The task description is set
based on the user's
input, which was saved to #{todoList.description}. Then, the task is
assigned to
the current user, which was stored in the seam actor component. Note that in
this example, the process has no extra process state. All the state in this example
is stored in the task definition. The process and task information is stored in the database
at the end of the request.
When todo.jsp is redisplayed, taskInstanceList now finds
the task that was just created.
The task is shown in an h:dataTable. The internal state of the task is
displayed in
each column: #{task.description}, #{task.priority},
#{task.dueDate}, etc... These fields
can all be edited and saved back to the database.
Each todo item also has "Done" button, which calls #{todoList.done}. The
todoList component
knows which task the button is for because each s:button specificies
taskInstance="#{task}", referring
to the task for that particular line of of the table. The @StartTast and
@EndTask annotations
cause seam to make the task active and immediately complete the task. The original process then
transitions into the done state, according to the process definition, where it ends.
The state of the task and process are both updated in the database.
When todo.jsp is displayed again, the now-completed task is no longer
displayed in the
taskInstanceList, since that component only display active tasks for the user.
For Seam applications with relatively freeform (ad hoc) navigation, JSF/Seam navigation rules are a perfectly good way to define the page flow. For applications with a more constrained style of navigation, especially for user interfaces which are more stateful, navigation rules make it difficult to really understand the flow of the system. To understand the flow, you need to piece it together from the view pages, the actions and the navigation rules.
Seam allows you to use a jPDL process definition to define pageflow. The simple number guessing example shows how this is done.

The example is implemented using one JavaBean, three JSP pages and a jPDL pageflow definition. Let's begin with the pageflow:
Example 1.20. pageflow.jpdl.xml
<pageflow-definition
xmlns="http://jboss.com/products/seam/pageflow"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://jboss.com/products/seam/pageflow
http://jboss.com/products/seam/pageflow-2.1.xsd"
name="numberGuess">
<start-page
name="displayGuess" view-id="/numberGuess.jspx">
<redirect/>
<transit
ion name="guess" to="evaluateGuess">
<acti
on expression="#{numberGuess.guess}"/>
</transition>
<transition name="giveup" to="giveup"/>
<transition name="cheat" to="cheat"/>
</start-page>
<decision name="evaluateGuess" expression="#{numberGuess.correctGuess}">
<transition name="true" to="win"/>
<transition name="false" to="evaluateRemainingGuesses"/>
</decision>
<decision name="evaluateRemainingGuesses" expression="#{numberGuess.lastGuess}">
<transition name="true" to="lose"/>
<transition name="false" to="displayGuess"/>
</decision>
<page name="giveup" view-id="/giveup.jspx">
<redirect/>
<transition name="yes" to="lose"/>
<transition name="no" to="displayGuess"/>
</page>
<process-state name="cheat">
<sub-process name="cheat"/>
<transition to="displayGuess"/>
</process-state>
<page name="win" view-id="/win.jspx">
<redirect/>
<end-conversation/>
</page>
<page name="lose" view-id="/lose.jspx">
<redirect/>
<end-conversation/>
</page>
</pageflow-definition>![]() | The |
![]() | The |
![]() | A transition |
![]() | A |
Here is what the pageflow looks like in the JBoss Developer Studio pageflow editor:

Now that we have seen the pageflow, it is very, very easy to understand the rest of the application!
Here is the main page of the application, numberGuess.jspx:
Example 1.21. numberGuess.jspx
<<?xml version="1.0"?>
<jsp:root xmlns:jsp="http://java.sun.com/JSP/Page"
xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html"
xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core"
xmlns:s="http://jboss.com/products/seam/taglib"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
version="2.0">
<jsp:output doctype-root-element="html"
doctype-public="-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
doctype-system="http://www.w3c.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"/>
<jsp:directive.page contentType="text/html"/>
<html>
<head>
<title>Guess a number...</title>
<link href="niceforms.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="niceforms.js" />
</head>
<body>
<h1>Guess a number...</h1>
<f:view>
<h:form styleClass="niceform">
<div>
<h:messages globalOnly="true"/>
<h:outputText value="Higher!"
rendered="#{numberGuess.randomNumber gt numberGuess.currentGuess}"/>
<h:outputText value="Lower!"
rendered="#{numberGuess.randomNumber lt numberGuess.currentGuess}"/>
</div>
<div>
I'm thinking of a number between
<h:outputText value="#{numberGuess.smallest}"/> and
<h:outputText value="#{numberGuess.biggest}"/>. You have
<h:outputText value="#{numberGuess.remainingGuesses}"/> guesses.
</div>
<div>
Your guess:
<h:inputText value="#{numberGuess.currentGuess}" id="inputGuess"
required="true" size="3"
rendered="#{(numberGuess.biggest-numberGuess.smallest) gt 20}">
<f:validateLongRange maximum="#{numberGuess.biggest}"
minimum="#{numberGuess.smallest}"/>
</h:inputText>
<h:selectOneMenu value="#{numberGuess.currentGuess}"
id="selectGuessMenu" required="true"
rendered="#{(numberGuess.biggest-numberGuess.smallest) le 20 and
(numberGuess.biggest-numberGuess.smallest) gt 4}">
<s:selectItems value="#{numberGuess.possibilities}" var="i" label="#{i}"/>
</h:selectOneMenu>
<h:selectOneRadio value="#{numberGuess.currentGuess}" id="selectGuessRadio"
required="true"
rendered="#{(numberGuess.biggest-numberGuess.smallest) le 4}">
<s:selectItems value="#{numberGuess.possibilities}" var="i" label="#{i}"/>
</h:selectOneRadio>
<h:commandButton value="Guess" action="guess"/>
<s:button value="Cheat" view="/confirm.jspx"/>
<s:button value="Give up" action="giveup"/>
</div>
<div>
<h:message for="inputGuess" style="color: red"/>
</div>
</h:form>
</f:view>
</body>
</html>
</jsp:root>
Notice how the command button names the guess transition instead of calling an
action directly.
The win.jspx page is predictable:
Example 1.22. win.jspx
<jsp:root xmlns:jsp="http://java.sun.com/JSP/Page"
xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html"
xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
version="2.0">
<jsp:output doctype-root-element="html"
doctype-public="-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
doctype-system="http://www.w3c.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"/>
<jsp:directive.page contentType="text/html"/>
<html>
<head>
<title>You won!</title>
<link href="niceforms.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
</head>
<body>
<h1>You won!</h1>
<f:view>
Yes, the answer was <h:outputText value="#{numberGuess.currentGuess}" />.
It took you <h:outputText value="#{numberGuess.guessCount}" /> guesses.
<h:outputText value="But you cheated, so it doesn't count!"
rendered="#{numberGuess.cheat}"/>
Would you like to <a href="numberGuess.seam">play again</a>?
</f:view>
</body>
</html>
</jsp:root>
The lose.jspx looks roughly the same, so we'll skip over it.
Finally, we'll look at the actual application code:
Example 1.23. NumberGuess.java
@Name("numberGuess")
@Scope(ScopeType.CONVERSATION)
public class NumberGuess implements Serializable {
private int randomNumber;
private Integer currentGuess;
private int biggest;
private int smallest;
private int guessCount;
private int maxGuesses;
private boolean cheated;
@Create
public void begin()
{
randomNumber = new Random().nextInt(100);
guessCount = 0;
biggest = 100;
smallest = 1;
}
public void setCurrentGuess(Integer guess)
{
this.currentGuess = guess;
}
public Integer getCurrentGuess()
{
return currentGuess;
}
public void guess()
{
if (currentGuess>randomNumber)
{
biggest = currentGuess - 1;
}
if (currentGuess<randomNumber)
{
smallest = currentGuess + 1;
}
guessCount ++;
}
public boolean isCorrectGuess()
{
return currentGuess==randomNumber;
}
public int getBiggest()
{
return biggest;
}
public int getSmallest()
{
return smallest;
}
public int getGuessCount()
{
return guessCount;
}
public boolean isLastGuess()
{
return guessCount==maxGuesses;
}
public int getRemainingGuesses() {
return maxGuesses-guessCount;
}
public void setMaxGuesses(int maxGuesses) {
this.maxGuesses = maxGuesses;
}
public int getMaxGuesses() {
return maxGuesses;
}
public int getRandomNumber() {
return randomNumber;
}
public void cheated()
{
cheated = true;
}
public boolean isCheat() {
return cheated;
}
public List<Integer> getPossibilities()
{
List<Integer> result = new ArrayList<Integer>();
for(int i=smallest; i<=biggest; i++) result.add(i);
return result;
}
}
![]() | The first time a JSP page asks for a |
The pages.xml file starts a Seam
conversation (much more about that later), and specifies the
pageflow definition to use for the conversation's page flow.
Example 1.24. pages.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<pages xmlns="http://jboss.com/products/seam/pages"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://jboss.com/products/seam/pages http://jboss.com/products/seam/pages-2.1.xsd">
<page view-id="/numberGuess.jspx">
<begin-conversation join="true" pageflow="numberGuess"/>
</page>
</pages>
As you can see, this Seam component is pure business logic! It doesn't need to know anything at all about the user interaction flow. This makes the component potentially more reuseable.
We'll step through basic flow of the application. The game starts with the
numberGuess.jspx view. When the page is first displayed, the
pages.xml configuration causes conversation to begin and associates
the numberGuess pageflow
with that conversation. The pageflow starts with a start-page tag,
which is a wait state, so the numberGuess.xhtml is rendered.
The view references the numberGuess component, causing a new
instance to be created and stored in the conversation. The @Create method
is called, initializing the state of the game. The view displays an h:form
that allows the user to edit #{numberGuess.currentGuess}.
The "Guess" button triggers the guess action. Seam defers to the pageflow
to handle the action, which says that the pageflow should transition to the evaluateGuess
state, first invoking #{numberGuess.guess}, which updates the guess count
and highest/lowest suggestions in the numberGuess component.
The evaluateGuess state checks the value of #{numberGuess.correctGuess}
and transitions either to the win or evaluatingRemainingGuesses
state. We'll assume the number was incorrect, in which case the pageflow transitions to
evaluatingRemainingGuesses. That is also a decision state, which
tests the #{numberGuess.lastGuess} state to determine whether or not the user has
more guesses. If there are more guesses (lastGuess is false),
we transition back to the original displayGuess state. Finally we've
reached a page state, so the associated page /numberGuess.jspx is displayed.
Since the page has a redirect element, Seam sends a redirect to the the user's browser,
starting the process over.
We won't follow the state any more except to note that if on a future request either the
win or the lose transition were taken, the user would
be taken to either the /win.jspx or /lose.jspx.
Both states specify that Seam should end the conversation, tossing away all the game state and
pageflow state, before redirecting the user to the
final page.
The numberguess example also contains Giveup and Cheat buttons. You should be able to
trace the pageflow state for both actions relatively easily. Pay particular attention
to the cheat transition, which loads a sub-process to handle that flow.
Although it's
overkill for this application, it does demonstrate how complex pageflows can be broken down into
smaller parts to make them easier to understand.
The booking application is a complete hotel room reservation system incorporating the following features:
User registration
Login
Logout
Set password
Hotel search
Hotel selection
Room reservation
Reservation confirmation
Existing reservation list

The booking application uses JSF, EJB 3.0 and Seam, together with Facelets for the view. There is also a port of this application to JSF, Facelets, Seam, JavaBeans and Hibernate3.
One of the things you'll notice if you play with this application for long enough is that it is extremely robust. You can play with back buttons and browser refresh and opening multiple windows and entering nonsensical data as much as you like and you will find it very difficult to make the application crash. You might think that we spent weeks testing and fixing bugs to achive this. Actually, this is not the case. Seam was designed to make it very straightforward to build robust web applications and a lot of robustness that you are probably used to having to code yourself comes naturally and automatically with Seam.
As you browse the sourcecode of the example application, and learn how the application works, observe how the declarative state management and integrated validation has been used to achieve this robustness.
The project structure is identical to the previous one, to install and deploy this application,
please refer to Section 1.1, “Using the Seam examples”. Once you've successfully started the application, you
can access it by pointing your browser to
http://localhost:8080/seam-booking/
The application uses six session beans for to implement the business logic for the listed features.
AuthenticatorAction provides the login authentication logic.
BookingListAction retrieves existing bookings for the currently logged in user.
ChangePasswordAction updates the password of the currently logged in user.
HotelBookingAction implements booking and confirmation
functionality. This functionality is implemented as a
conversation, so this is one of the most interesting classes in the
application.
HotelSearchingAction implements the hotel search functionality.
RegisterAction registers a new system user.
Three entity beans implement the application's persistent domain model.
Hotel is an entity bean that represent a hotel
Booking is an entity bean that represents an existing booking
User is an entity bean to represents a user who can make hotel bookings
We encourage you browse the sourcecode at your pleasure. In this tutorial we'll concentrate upon one particular piece of functionality: hotel search, selection, booking and confirmation. From the point of view of the user, everything from selecting a hotel to confirming a booking is one continuous unit of work, a conversation. Searching, however, is not part of the conversation. The user can select multiple hotels from the same search results page, in different browser tabs.
Most web application architectures have no first class construct to represent a conversation. This
causes enormous problems managing conversational state. Usually, Java web applications
use a combination of several techniques. Some state can be transfered in the URL.
What can't is either thrown into the
HttpSession or flushed to the database after every
request, and reconstructed from the database at the beginning of each new request.
Since the database is the least scalable tier, this often results in an utterly unacceptable lack of scalability. Added latency is also a problem, due to the extra traffic to and from the database on every request. To reduce this redundant traffic, Java applications often introduce a data (second-level) cache that keeps commonly accessed data between requests. This cache is necessarily inefficient, because invalidation is based upon an LRU policy instead of being based upon when the user has finished working with the data. Furthermore, because the cache is shared between many concurrent transactions, we've introduced a whole raft of problem's associated with keeping the cached state consistent with the database.
Now consider the state held in the HttpSession. The HttpSession is great
place for true session data, data that is common to all requests that the user has with the application.
However, it's a bad place to store data related to individual series of requests. Using the session of
conversational quickly breaks down when dealing with the back button and multiple windows.
On top of that, without careful
programming, data in the HTTP Session can grow quite large, making the HTTP session difficult
to cluster. Developing mechanisms to isolate session state associated with different concurrent
conversations, and incorporating failsafes to ensure that conversation state is destroyed when
the user aborts one of the
conversations by closing a browser window or tab is not for the faint hearted. Fortunately, with Seam,
you don't have to worry about that.
Seam introduces the conversation context as a first class construct. You can safely keep conversational state in this context, and be assured that it will have a well-defined lifecycle. Even better, you won't need to be continually pushing data back and forth between the application server and the database, since the conversation context is a natural cache of data that the user is currently working with.
In this application, we'll use the conversation context to store stateful session beans.
There is an ancient canard in the Java
community that stateful session beans are a scalability killer. This may have been true in the
early days of enterprise Java, but it is no longer true today. Modern application servers have
extremely
sophisticated mechanisms for stateful session bean state replication. JBoss AS, for example, performs
fine-grained replication, replicating only those bean attribute values which actually
changed. Note that all the traditional technical arguments for why stateful beans are inefficient apply
equally to the HttpSession, so the practice of shifting state from business tier
stateful session bean components to the web session to try and improve performance is unbelievably
misguided. It is certainly possible to write unscalable applications using stateful session beans, by
using stateful beans incorrectly, or by using them for the wrong thing. But that doesn't mean you should
never use them.
If you remain unconvinced, Seam allows the use of POJOs instead of stateful session beans.
With Seam, the choice is yours.
The booking example application shows how stateful components with different scopes can collaborate together to achieve complex behaviors. The main page of the booking application allows the user to search for hotels. The search results are kept in the Seam session scope. When the user navigates to one of these hotels, a conversation begins, and a conversation scoped component calls back to the session scoped component to retrieve the selected hotel.
The booking example also demonstrates the use of RichFaces Ajax to implement rich client behavior without the use of handwritten JavaScript.
The search functionality is implemented using a session-scope stateful session bean, similar to the one we saw in the message list example.
Example 1.25. HotelSearchingAction.java
@Stateful@Name("hotelSearch") @Scope(ScopeType.SESSION) @Restrict("#{i
dentity.loggedIn}") public class HotelSearchingAction implements HotelSearching { @PersistenceContext private EntityManager em; private String searchString; private int pageSize = 10; private int page; @DataModel
private List<Hotel> hotels; public void find() { page = 0; queryHotels(); } public void nextPage() { page++; queryHotels(); } private void queryHotels() { hotels = em.createQuery("select h from Hotel h where lower(h.name) like #{pattern} " + "or lower(h.city) like #{pattern} " + "or lower(h.zip) like #{pattern} " + "or lower(h.address) like #{pattern}") .setMaxResults(pageSize) .setFirstResult( page * pageSize ) .getResultList(); } public boolean isNextPageAvailable() { return hotels!=null && hotels.size()==pageSize; } public int getPageSize() { return pageSize; } public void setPageSize(int pageSize) { this.pageSize = pageSize; } @Factory(value="pattern", scope=ScopeType.EVENT) public String getSearchPattern() { return searchString==null ? "%" : '%' + searchString.toLowerCase().replace('*', '%') + '%'; } public String getSearchString() { return searchString; } public void setSearchString(String searchString) { this.searchString = searchString; }
@Remove public void destroy() {} }
![]() | The EJB standard |
![]() | The |
![]() | The
|
![]() | The EJB standard |
The main page of the application is a Facelets page. Let's look at the fragment which relates to searching for hotels:
Example 1.26. main.xhtml
<div class="section">
<span class="errors">
<h:messages globalOnly="true"/>
</span>
<h1>Search Hotels</h1>
<h:form id="searchCriteria">
<fieldset>
<h:inputText id="searchString" value="#{hotelSearch.searchString}"
style="width: 165px;">
<a:support event="onkeyup" actionListener="#{hotelSearch.find}"
reRender="searchResults" />
</h:inputText>
 
<a:commandButton id="findHotels" value="Find Hotels" action="#{hotelSearch.find}"
reRender="searchResults"/>
 
<a:stat
us>
<f:facet name="start">
<h:graphicImage value="/img/spinner.gif"/>
</f:facet>
</a:status>
<br/>
<h:outputLabel for="pageSize">Maximum results:</h:outputLabel> 
<h:selectOneMenu value="#{hotelSearch.pageSize}" id="pageSize">
<f:selectItem itemLabel="5" itemValue="5"/>
<f:selectItem itemLabel="10" itemValue="10"/>
<f:selectItem itemLabel="20" itemValue="20"/>
</h:selectOneMenu>
</fieldset>
</h:form>
</div>
<a:outputPanel
id="searchResults">
<div class="section">
<h:outputText value="No Hotels Found"
rendered="#{hotels != null and hotels.rowCount==0}"/>
<h:dataTable id="hotels" value="#{hotels}" var="hot"
rendered="#{hotels.rowCount>0}">
<h:column>
<f:facet name="header">Name</f:facet>
#{hot.name}
</h:column>
<h:column>
<f:facet name="header">Address</f:facet>
#{hot.address}
</h:column>
<h:column>
<f:facet name="header">City, State</f:facet>
#{hot.city}, #{hot.state}, #{hot.country}
</h:column>
<h:column>
<f:facet name="header">Zip</f:facet>
#{hot.zip}
</h:column>
<h:column>
<f:facet name="header">Action</f:facet>
<s
:link id="viewHotel" value="View Hotel"
action="#{hotelBooking.selectHotel(hot)}"/>
</h:column>
</h:dataTable>
<s:link value="More results" action="#{hotelSearch.nextPage}"
rendered="#{hotelSearch.nextPageAvailable}"/>
</div>
</a:outputPanel> ![]() | The RichFaces Ajax |
![]() | The RichFaces Ajax |
![]() | The RichFaces Ajax |
![]() | The Seam If you're wondering how navigation occurs,
you can find all the rules in |
This page displays the search results dynamically as we type, and lets us choose a hotel and pass it
to the selectHotel() method of the HotelBookingAction, which is
where the really interesting stuff is going to happen.
Now let's see how the booking example application uses a conversation-scoped stateful session bean to achieve a natural cache of persistent data related to the conversation. The following code example is pretty long. But if you think of it as a list of scripted actions that implement the various steps of the conversation, it's understandable. Read the class from top to bottom, as if it were a story.
Example 1.27. HotelBookingAction.java
@Stateful
@Name("hotelBooking")
@Restrict("#{identity.loggedIn}")
public class HotelBookingAction implements HotelBooking
{
@Persistenc
eContext(type=EXTENDED)
private EntityManager em;
@In
private User user;
@In(required=false) @Out
private Hotel hotel;
@In(required=false)
@Out(requir
ed=false)
private Booking booking;
@In
private FacesMessages facesMessages;
@In
private Events events;
@Logger
private Log log;
private boolean bookingValid;
@Begin
public void selectHotel(Hotel selectedHotel)
{
hotel = em.merge(selectedHotel);
}
public void bookHotel()
{
booking = new Booking(hotel, user);
Calendar calendar = Calendar.getInstance();
booking.setCheckinDate( calendar.getTime() );
calendar.add(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH, 1);
booking.setCheckoutDate( calendar.getTime() );
}
public void setBookingDetails()
{
Calendar calendar = Calendar.getInstance();
calendar.add(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH, -1);
if ( booking.getCheckinDate().before( calendar.getTime() ) )
{
facesMessages.addToControl("checkinDate", "Check in date must be a future date");
bookingValid=false;
}
else if ( !booking.getCheckinDate().before( booking.getCheckoutDate() ) )
{
facesMessages.addToControl("checkoutDate",
"Check out date must be later than check in date");
bookingValid=false;
}
else
{
bookingValid=true;
}
}
public boolean isBookingValid()
{
return bookingValid;
}
@End
public void confirm()
{
em.persist(booking);
facesMessages.add("Thank you, #{user.name}, your confimation number " +
" for #{hotel.name} is #{booki g.id}");
log.info("New booking: #{booking.id} for #{user.username}");
events.raiseTransactionSuccessEvent("bookingConfirmed");
}
@End
public void cancel() {}
@Remove
public void destroy() {}
![]() | This bean uses an EJB3 extended persistence context, so that any entity instances remain managed for the whole lifecycle of the stateful session bean. |
![]() | The
|
![]() | The
|
![]() | The
|
![]() | This EJB remove method will be called when Seam destroys the conversation context. Don't forget to define this method! |
HotelBookingAction contains all the action listener methods that implement selection,
booking and booking confirmation, and holds state related to this work in its instance variables. We
think you'll agree that this code is much cleaner and simpler than getting and setting
HttpSession attributes.
Even better, a user can have multiple isolated conversations per login session. Try it! Log in, run a search, and navigate to different hotel pages in multiple browser tabs. You'll be able to work on creating two different hotel reservations at the same time. If you leave any one conversation inactive for long enough, Seam will eventually time out that conversation and destroy its state. If, after ending a conversation, you backbutton to a page of that conversation and try to perform an action, Seam will detect that the conversation was already ended, and redirect you to the search page.
The WAR also includes seam-debug.jar. The Seam debug page will be available
if this jar is deployed in
WEB-INF/lib, along with the Facelets, and if you set the debug property
of the init component:
<core:init jndi-pattern="@jndiPattern@" debug="true"/>
This page lets you browse and inspect the Seam components
in any of the Seam contexts associated with your current login session. Just point your browser at
http://localhost:8080/seam-booking/debug.seam
.

Long-running conversations make it simple to maintain consistency of state in an application even in the face of multi-window operation and back-buttoning. Unfortunately, simply beginning and ending a long-running conversation is not always enough. Depending on the requirements of the application, inconsistencies between what the user's expectations and the reality of the application’s state can still result.
The nested booking application extends the features of the hotel booking application to incorporate the selection of rooms. Each hotel has available rooms with descriptions for a user to select from. This requires the addition of a room selection page in the hotel reservation flow.

The user now has the option to select any available room to be included in the booking. As with the
hotel booking application we saw previously, this can lead to issues with state consistency. As with storing state
in the HTTPSession, if a conversation variable changes it affects all windows operating within
the same conversation context.
To demonstrate this, let’s suppose the user clones the room selection screen in a new window. The user then selects the Wonderful Room and proceeds to the confirmation screen. To see just how much it would cost to live the high-life, the user returns to the original window, selects the Fantastic Suite for booking, and again proceeds to confirmation. After reviewing the total cost, the user decides that practicality wins out and returns to the window showing Wonderful Room to confirm.
In this scenario, if we simply store all state in the conversation, we are not protected from multi-window operation within the same conversation. Nested conversations allow us to achieve correct behavior even when context can vary within the same conversation.
Now let's see how the nested booking example extends the behavior of the hotel booking application through use of nested conversations. Again, we can read the class from top to bottom, as if it were a story.
Example 1.28. RoomPreferenceAction.java
@Stateful
@Name("roomPreference")
@Restrict("#{identity.loggedIn}")
public class RoomPreferenceAction implements RoomPreference
{
@Logger
private Log log;
@In private Hotel hotel;
@In private Booking booking;
@DataModel(value="availableRooms")
private List<Room> availableRooms;
@DataModelSelection(value="availableRooms")
private Room roomSelection;
@In(required=false, value="roomSelection")
@Out(required=false, value="roomSelection")
private Room room;
@Factory("availableRooms")
public void
loadAvailableRooms()
{
availableRooms = hotel.getAvailableRooms(booking.getCheckinDate(), booking.getCheckoutDate());
log.info("Retrieved #0 available rooms", availableRooms.size());
}
public BigDecimal getExpectedPrice()
{
log.info("Retrieving price for room #0", roomSelection.getName());
return booking.getTotal(roomSelection);
}
@Begin(nest
ed=true)
public String selectPreference()
{
log.info("Room selected");
this.roo
m = this.roomSelection;
return "payment";
}
public String requestConfirmation()
{
// all validations are performed through the s:validateAll, so checks are already
// performed
log.info("Request confirmation from user");
return "confirm";
}
@End(beforeRedirect=true)
public Stri
ng cancel()
{
log.info("ending conversation");
return "cancel";
}
@Destroy @Remove
public void destroy() {}
}
![]() | The |
![]() | When
|
![]() | The |
![]() | The
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When we begin a nested conversation it is pushed onto the conversation stack. In the nestedbooking
example, the conversation stack consists of the outer long-running conversation (the booking) and each of the nested conversations (room
selections).
Example 1.29. rooms.xhtml
<div class="section">
<h1>Room Preference</h1>
</div>
<div class="section">
<h:form id="room_selections_form">
<div class="section">
<h:outputText styleClass="output"
value="No rooms available for the dates selected: "
rendered="#{availableRooms != null and availableRooms.rowCount == 0}"/>
<h:outputText styleClass="output"
value="Rooms available for the dates selected: "
rendered="#{availableRooms != null and availableRooms.rowCount > 0}"/>
<h:outputText styleClass="output" value="#{booking.checkinDate}"/> -
<h:outputText styleClass="output" value="#{booking.checkoutDate}"/>
<br/><br/>
<h:dataTable value="#{availableRooms}" var="room"
rendered="#{availableRooms.rowCount > 0}">
<h:column>
<f:facet name="header">Name</f:facet>
#{room.name}
</h:column>
<h:column>
<f:facet name="header">Description</f:facet>
#{room.description}
</h:column>
<h:column>
<f:facet name="header">Per Night</f:facet>
<h:outputText value="#{room.price}">
<f:convertNumber type="currency" currencySymbol="$"/>
</h:outputText>
</h:column>
<h:column>
<f:facet name="header">Action</f:facet>
<h:commandLink id="selectRoomPreference"
action="#{roomPreference.selectPreference}">Select</h:commandLink>
</h:column>
</h:dataTable>
</div>
<div class="entry">
<div class="label"> </div>
<d
iv class="input">
<s:button id="cancel" value="Revise Dates" view="/book.xhtml"/>
</div>
</div>
</h:form>
</div>
![]() | When requested from EL, the |
![]() | Invoking the |
![]() | Revising the dates simply returns to the |
Now that we have seen how to nest a conversation, let's see how we can confirm the booking once a room has been selected. This
can be achieved by simply extending the behavior of the HotelBookingAction.
Example 1.30. HotelBookingAction.java
@Stateful
@Name("hotelBooking")
@Restrict("#{identity.loggedIn}")
public class HotelBookingAction implements HotelBooking
{
@PersistenceContext(type=EXTENDED)
private EntityManager em;
@In
private User user;
@In(required=false) @Out
private Hotel hotel;
@In(required=false)
@Out(required=false)
private Booking booking;
@In(required=false)
private Room roomSelection;
@In
private FacesMessages facesMessages;
@In
private Events events;
@Logger
private Log log;
@Begin
public void selectHotel(Hotel selectedHotel)
{
log.info("Selected hotel #0", selectedHotel.getName());
hotel = em.merge(selectedHotel);
}
public String setBookingDates()
{
// the result will indicate whether or not to begin the nested conversation
// as well as the navigation. if a null result is returned, the nested
// conversation will not begin, and the user will be returned to the current
// page to fix validation issues
String result = null;
Calendar calendar = Calendar.getInstance();
calendar.add(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH, -1);
// validate what we have received from the user so far
if ( booking.getCheckinDate().before( calendar.getTime() ) )
{
facesMessages.addToControl("checkinDate", "Check in date must be a future date");
}
else if ( !booking.getCheckinDate().before( booking.getCheckoutDate() ) )
{
facesMessages.addToControl("checkoutDate", "Check out date must be later than check in date");
}
else
{
result = "rooms";
}
return result;
}
public void bookHotel()
{
booking = new Booking(hotel, user);
Calendar calendar = Calendar.getInstance();
booking.setCheckinDate( calendar.getTime() );
calendar.add(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH, 1);
booking.setCheckoutDate( calendar.getTime() );
}
@End(root=true)
public void
confirm()
{
// on confirmation we set the room preference in the booking. the room preference
// will be injected based on the nested conversation we are in.
booking.setRoomPreference(roomSelection);
em.persist(booking);
facesMessages.add("Thank you, #{user.name}, your confimation number for #{hotel.name} is #{booking.id}");
log.info("New booking: #{booking.id} for #{user.username}");
events.raiseTransactionSuccessEvent("bookingConfirmed");
}
@End(root=t
rue, beforeRedirect=true)
public void cancel() {}
@Destroy @Remove
public void destroy() {}
}
![]() | Annotating an action with
|
![]() | The |
![]() | By simply annotating the cancellation action with
|
Feel free to deploy the application, open many windows or tabs and attempt combinations of various hotels with various room preferences. Confirming a booking always results in the correct hotel and room preference thanks to the nested conversation model.
The DVD Store demo application shows the practical usage of jBPM for both task management and pageflow.
The user screens take advantage of a jPDL pageflow to implement searching and shopping cart functionality.

The administration screens take use jBPM to manage the approval and shipping cycle for orders. The business process may even be changed dynamically, by selecting a different process definition!

The Seam DVD Store demo can be run from dvdstore directory,
just like the other demo applications.
Seam makes it very easy to implement applications which keep state on the server-side. However, server-side state is not always appropriate, especially in for functionality that serves up content. For this kind of problem we often want to keep application state in the URL so that any page can be accessed at any time through a bookmark. The blog example shows how to a implement an application that supports bookmarking throughout, even on the search results page. This example demonstrates how Seam can manage application state in the URL as well as how Seam can rewrite those URLs to be even

The Blog example demonstrates the use of "pull"-style MVC, where instead of using action listener methods to retrieve data and prepare the data for the view, the view pulls data from components as it is being rendered.
This snippet from the index.xhtml facelets page displays a list of recent blog
entries:
Example 1.31.
<h:dataTable value="#{blog.recentBlogEntries}" var="blogEntry" rows="3">
<h:column>
<div class="blogEntry">
<h3>#{blogEntry.title}</h3>
<div>
<s:formattedText value="#{blogEntry.excerpt==null ? blogEntry.body : blogEntry.excerpt}"/>
</div>
<p>
<s:link view="/entry.xhtml" rendered="#{blogEntry.excerpt!=null}" propagation="none"
value="Read more...">
<f:param name="blogEntryId" value="#{blogEntry.id}"/>
</s:link>
</p>
<p>
[Posted on 
<h:outputText value="#{blogEntry.date}">
<f:convertDateTime timeZone="#{blog.timeZone}" locale="#{blog.locale}" type="both"/>
</h:outputText>]
 
<s:link view="/entry.xhtml" propagation="none" value="[Link]">
<f:param name="blogEntryId" value="#{blogEntry.id}"/>
</s:link>
</p>
</div>
</h:column>
</h:dataTable>
If we navigate to this page from a bookmark, how does the #{blog.recentBlogEntries}
data used by the <h:dataTable> actually get initialized?
The Blog is retrieved lazily — "pulled" — when needed, by a Seam
component named blog. This is the opposite flow of control to what is used in
traditional action-based web frameworks like Struts.
Example 1.32.
@Name("blog")
@Scope(ScopeType.STATELESS)
@AutoCreate
public class BlogService
{
@In EntityM
anager entityManager;
@Unwrap
public Blog getBlog()
{
return (Blog) entityManager.createQuery("select distinct b from Blog b left join fetch b.blogEntries")
.setHint("org.hibernate.cacheable", true)
.getSingleResult();
}
}![]() | This component uses a seam-managed persistence context. Unlike the other examples we've seen, this persistence context is managed by Seam, instead of by the EJB3 container. The persistence context spans the entire web request, allowing us to avoid any exceptions that occur when accessing unfetched associations in the view. |
![]() | The |
This is good so far, but what about bookmarking the result of form submissions, such as a search results page?
The blog example has a tiny form in the top right of each page that allows the user to search for
blog entries. This is defined in a file, menu.xhtml, included by the facelets
template, template.xhtml:
Example 1.33.
<div id="search">
<h:form>
<h:inputText value="#{searchAction.searchPattern}"/>
<h:commandButton value="Search" action="/search.xhtml"/>
</h:form>
</div>
To implement a bookmarkable search results page, we need to perform a browser redirect after processing the search form submission. Because we used the JSF view id as the action outcome, Seam automatically redirects to the view id when the form is submitted. Alternatively, we could have defined a navigation rule like this:
<navigation-rule>
<navigation-case>
<from-outcome>searchResults</from-outcome>
<to-view-id>/search.xhtml</to-view-id>
<redirect/>
</navigation-case>
</navigation-rule>
Then the form would have looked like this:
<div id="search">
<h:form>
<h:inputText value="#{searchAction.searchPattern}"/>
<h:commandButton value="Search" action="searchResults"/>
</h:form>
</div>
But when we redirect, we need to include the values submitted with the form
in the URL to get a bookmarkable URL like
http://localhost:8080/seam-blog/search/. JSF does not provide
an easy way to do this, but Seam does. We use two Seam features
to accomplish this: page parameters and URL rewriting.
Both are defined in WEB-INF/pages.xml:
Example 1.34.
<pages>
<page view-id="/search.xhtml">
<rewrite pattern="/search/{searchPattern}"/>
<rewrite pattern="/search"/>
<param name="searchPattern" value="#{searchService.searchPattern}"/>
</page>
...
</pages>
The page parameter instructs Seam to link the request parameter named searchPattern
to the value of #{searchService.searchPattern}, both whenever a request for
the Search page comes in and whenever a link to the search page is generated. Seam
takes responsibility for maintaining the link between URL state and application state, and you,
the developer, don't have to worry about it.
Without URL rewriting, the URL for a search on the term book
would be http://localhost:8080/seam-blog/seam/search.xhtml?searchPattern=book.
This is nice, but Seam can make the URL even simpler using a rewrite rule. The first
rewrite rule, for the pattern /search/{searchPattern}, says that
any time we have a URL for search.xhtml with a searchPattern request parameter, we can
fold that URL into the simpler URL. So,the URL we saw earlier,
http://localhost:8080/seam-blog/seam/search.xhtml?searchPattern=book
can be written instead as http://localhost:8080/seam-blog/search/book.
Just like with page parameters, URL rewriting is bi-directional. That means that Seam
forwards requests for the simpler URL to the the right view, and it also automatically generates
the simpler view for you. You never need to worry about constructing URLs. It's
all handled transparently behind the scenes. The only requirement is that to use URL rewriting,
the rewrite filter needs to be enabled in components.xml.
<web:rewrite-filter view-mapping="/seam/*" />
The redirect takes us to the search.xhtml page:
<h:dataTable value="#{searchResults}" var="blogEntry">
<h:column>
<div>
<s:link view="/entry.xhtml" propagation="none" value="#{blogEntry.title}">
<f:param name="blogEntryId" value="#{blogEntry.id}"/>
</s:link>
posted on
<h:outputText value="#{blogEntry.date}">
<f:convertDateTime timeZone="#{blog.timeZone}" locale="#{blog.locale}" type="both"/>
</h:outputText>
</div>
</h:column>
</h:dataTable>
Which again uses "pull"-style MVC to retrieve the actual search results using Hibernate Search.
@Name("searchService")
public class SearchService
{
@In
private FullTextEntityManager entityManager;
private String searchPattern;
@Factory("searchResults")
public List<BlogEntry> getSearchResults()
{
if (searchPattern==null || "".equals(searchPattern) ) {
searchPattern = null;
return entityManager.createQuery("select be from BlogEntry be order by date desc").getResultList();
}
else
{
Map<String,Float> boostPerField = new HashMap<String,Float>();
boostPerField.put( "title", 4f );
boostPerField.put( "body", 1f );
String[] productFields = {"title", "body"};
QueryParser parser = new MultiFieldQueryParser(productFields, new StandardAnalyzer(), boostPerField);
parser.setAllowLeadingWildcard(true);
org.apache.lucene.search.Query luceneQuery;
try
{
luceneQuery = parser.parse(searchPattern);
}
catch (ParseException e)
{
return null;
}
return entityManager.createFullTextQuery(luceneQuery, BlogEntry.class)
.setMaxResults(100)
.getResultList();
}
}
public String getSearchPattern()
{
return searchPattern;
}
public void setSearchPattern(String searchPattern)
{
this.searchPattern = searchPattern;
}
}
Very occasionally, it makes more sense to use push-style MVC for processing RESTful pages, and so
Seam provides the notion of a page action. The Blog example uses a page action for
the blog entry page, entry.xhtml. Note that this is a little bit contrived, it would
have been easier to use pull-style MVC here as well.
The entryAction component works much like an action class in a traditional
push-MVC action-oriented framework like Struts:
@Name("entryAction")
@Scope(STATELESS)
public class EntryAction
{
@In Blog blog;
@Out BlogEntry blogEntry;
public void loadBlogEntry(String id) throws EntryNotFoundException
{
blogEntry = blog.getBlogEntry(id);
if (blogEntry==null) throw new EntryNotFoundException(id);
}
}
Page actions are also declared in pages.xml:
<pages>
...
<page view-id="/entry.xhtml">
<rewrite pattern="/entry/{blogEntryId}" />
<rewrite pattern="/entry" />
<param name="blogEntryId"
value="#{blogEntry.id}"/>
<action execute="#{entryAction.loadBlogEntry(blogEntry.id)}"/>
</page>
<page view-id="/post.xhtml" login-required="true">
<rewrite pattern="/post" />
<action execute="#{postAction.post}"
if="#{validation.succeeded}"/>
<action execute="#{postAction.invalid}"
if="#{validation.failed}"/>
<navigation from-action="#{postAction.post}">
<redirect view-id="/index.xhtml"/>
</navigation>
</page>
<page view-id="*">
<action execute="#{blog.hitCount.hit}"/>
</page>
</pages>
Notice that the example is using page actions for post validation and the pageview counter. Also notice the use of a parameter in the page action method binding. This is not a standard feature of JSF EL, but Seam lets you use it, not just for page actions but also in JSF method bindings.
When the entry.xhtml page is requested, Seam first binds the page parameter
blogEntryId to the model. Keep in mind that because of the URL rewriting,
the blogEntryId parameter name won't show up in the URL. Seam then runs the page action, which retrieves
the needed
data — the blogEntry — and places it in the Seam event context.
Finally, the following is rendered:
<div class="blogEntry">
<h3>#{blogEntry.title}</h3>
<div>
<s:formattedText value="#{blogEntry.body}"/>
</div>
<p>
[Posted on 
<h:outputText value="#{blogEntry.date}">
<f:convertDateTime timeZone="#{blog.timeZone}" locale="#{blog.locale}" type="both"/>
</h:outputText>]
</p>
</div>
If the blog entry is not found in the database, the EntryNotFoundException
exception is thrown. We want this exception to result in a 404 error, not a 505, so we annotate the
exception class:
@ApplicationException(rollback=true)
@HttpError(errorCode=HttpServletResponse.SC_NOT_FOUND)
public class EntryNotFoundException extends Exception
{
EntryNotFoundException(String id)
{
super("entry not found: " + id);
}
}
An alternative implementation of the example does not use the parameter in the method binding:
@Name("entryAction")
@Scope(STATELESS)
public class EntryAction
{
@In(create=true)
private Blog blog;
@In @Out
private BlogEntry blogEntry;
public void loadBlogEntry() throws EntryNotFoundException
{
blogEntry = blog.getBlogEntry( blogEntry.getId() );
if (blogEntry==null) throw new EntryNotFoundException(id);
}
}
<pages>
...
<page view-id="/entry.xhtml" action="#{entryAction.loadBlogEntry}">
<param name="blogEntryId" value="#{blogEntry.id}"/>
</page>
...
</pages>
It is a matter of taste which implementation you prefer.
The blog demo also demonstrates very simple password authentication, posting to the blog, page fragment caching and atom feed generation.
The Seam distribution includes a command line utility that makes it really easy to set up an Eclipse project, generate some simple Seam skeleton code, and reverse engineer an application from a preexisting database.
This is the easy way to get your feet wet with Seam, and gives you some ammunition for next time you find yourself trapped in an elevator with one of those tedious Ruby guys ranting about how great and wonderful his new toy is for building totally trivial applications that put things in databases.
In this release, seam-gen works best for people with JBoss AS. You can use the generated project with other J2EE or Java EE 5 application servers by making a few manual changes to the project configuration.
You can use seam-gen without Eclipse, but in this tutorial, we want to show you how to use it in conjunction with Eclipse for debugging and integration testing. If you don't want to install Eclipse, you can still follow along with this tutorial—all steps can be performed from the command line.
seam-gen is basically just an intricate Ant script wrapped around Hibernate Tools, together with some templates. That makes it easy to customize if you need to.
Make sure you have JDK 5 or JDK 6 (see Section 42.1, “JDK Dependencies” for details), JBoss AS 4.2 or 5.0 and Ant 1.7.0, along with recent versions of Eclipse, the JBoss IDE plugin for Eclipse and the TestNG plugin for Eclipse correctly installed before starting. Add your JBoss installation to the JBoss Server View in Eclipse. Start JBoss in debug mode. Finally, start a command prompt in the directory where you unzipped the Seam distribution.
JBoss has sophisticated support for hot re-deployment of WARs and EARs. Unfortunately, due to bugs in the JVM, repeated redeployment of an EAR—which is common during development—eventually causes the JVM to run out of perm gen space. For this reason, we recommend running JBoss in a JVM with a large perm gen space at development time. If you're running JBoss from JBoss IDE, you can configure this in the server launch configuration, under "VM arguments". We suggest the following values:
-Xms512m -Xmx1024m -XX:PermSize=256m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m
If you don't have so much memory available, the following is our minimum recommendation:
-Xms256m -Xmx512m -XX:PermSize=128m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m
If you're running JBoss from the command line, you can configure the JVM options in
bin/run.conf.
If you don't want to bother with this stuff now, you don't have to—come back to it later, when you get
your first OutOfMemoryException.
The first thing we need to do is configure seam-gen for your environment: JBoss AS installation directory, project workspace, and database connection. It's easy, just type:
cd jboss-seam-2.0.x seam setup
And you will be prompted for the needed information:
~/workspace/jboss-seam$ ./seam setup
Buildfile: build.xml
init:
setup:
[echo] Welcome to seam-gen :-)
[input] Enter your project workspace (the directory that contains your Seam projects) [C:/Projects] [C:/Projects]
/Users/pmuir/workspace
[input] Enter your JBoss home directory [C:/Program Files/jboss-4.2.3.GA] [C:/Program Files/jboss-4.2.3.GA]
/Applications/jboss-4.2.3.GA
[input] Enter the project name [myproject] [myproject]
helloworld
[echo] Accepted project name as: helloworld
[input] Select a RichFaces skin (not applicable if using ICEFaces) [blueSky] ([blueSky], classic, ruby, wine, deepMarine, emeraldTown, sakura, DEFAULT)
[input] Is this project deployed as an EAR (with EJB components) or a WAR (with no EJB support) [ear] ([ear], war, )
[input] Enter the Java package name for your session beans [com.mydomain.helloworld] [com.mydomain.helloworld]
org.jboss.helloworld
[input] Enter the Java package name for your entity beans [org.jboss.helloworld] [org.jboss.helloworld]
[input] Enter the Java package name for your test cases [org.jboss.helloworld.test] [org.jboss.helloworld.test]
[input] What kind of database are you using? [hsql] ([hsql], mysql, oracle, postgres, mssql, db2, sybase, enterprisedb, h2)
mysql
[input] Enter the Hibernate dialect for your database [org.hibernate.dialect.MySQLDialect] [org.hibernate.dialect.MySQLDialect]
[input] Enter the filesystem path to the JDBC driver jar [lib/hsqldb.jar] [lib/hsqldb.jar]
/Users/pmuir/java/mysql.jar
[input] Enter JDBC driver class for your database [com.mysql.jdbc.Driver] [com.mysql.jdbc.Driver]
[input] Enter the JDBC URL for your database [jdbc:mysql:///test] [jdbc:mysql:///test]
jdbc:mysql:///helloworld
[input] Enter database username [sa] [sa]
pmuir
[input] Enter database password [] []
[input] skipping input as property hibernate.default_schema.new has already been set.
[input] Enter the database catalog name (it is OK to leave this blank) [] []
[input] Are you working with tables that already exist in the database? [n] (y, [n], )
y
[input] Do you want to drop and recreate the database tables and data in import.sql each time you deploy? [n] (y, [n], )
n
[input] Enter your ICEfaces home directory (leave blank to omit ICEfaces) [] []
[propertyfile] Creating new property file: /Users/pmuir/workspace/jboss-seam/seam-gen/build.properties
[echo] Installing JDBC driver jar to JBoss server
[echo] Type 'seam create-project' to create the new project
BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 1 minute 32 seconds
~/workspace/jboss-seam $ The tool provides sensible defaults, which you can accept by just pressing enter at the prompt.
The most important choice you need to make is between EAR deployment and WAR deployment of your project.
EAR projects support EJB 3.0 and require Java EE 5. WAR projects do not support EJB 3.0, but may be deployed
to a J2EE environment. The packaging of a WAR is also simpler to understand. If you installed an EJB3-ready
application server like JBoss, choose ear. Otherwise, choose war.
We'll assume that you've chosen an EAR deployment for the rest of the tutorial, but you can follow exactly
the same steps for a WAR deployment.
If you are working with an existing data model, make sure you tell seam-gen that the tables already exist in the database.
The settings are stored in seam-gen/build.properties, but you can also modify them
simply by running seam setup a second time.
Now we can create a new project in our Eclipse workspace directory, by typing:
seam new-project
C:\Projects\jboss-seam>seam new-project
Buildfile: build.xml
...
new-project:
[echo] A new Seam project named 'helloworld' was created in the C:\Projects directory
[echo] Type 'seam explode' and go to http://localhost:8080/helloworld
[echo] Eclipse Users: Add the project into Eclipse using File > New > Project and select General > Project (not Java Project)
[echo] NetBeans Users: Open the project in NetBeans
BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 7 seconds
C:\Projects\jboss-seam>This copies the Seam jars, dependent jars and the JDBC driver jar to a new Eclipse project, and generates
all needed resources and configuration files, a facelets template file and stylesheet, along with Eclipse
metadata and an Ant build script. The Eclipse project will be automatically deployed to an exploded
directory structure in JBoss AS as soon as you add the project using New -> Project...
-> General -> Project -> Next, typing the Project name
(helloworld in this case), and then clicking Finish. Do not select
Java Project from the New Project wizard.
If your default JDK in Eclipse is not a Java SE 5 or Java SE 6 JDK, you will need to select a Java SE 5
compliant JDK using Project -> Properties -> Java Compiler.
Alternatively, you can deploy the project from outside Eclipse by typing seam explode.
Go to http://localhost:8080/helloworld to see a welcome page. This is a facelets page,
view/home.xhtml, using the template view/layout/template.xhtml.
You can edit this page, or the template, in Eclipse, and see the results immediately,
by clicking refresh in your browser.
Don't get scared by the XML configuration documents that were generated into the project directory. They are mostly standard Java EE stuff, the stuff you need to create once and then never look at again, and they are 90% the same between all Seam projects. (They are so easy to write that even seam-gen can do it.)
The generated project includes three database and persistence configurations. The
persistence-test.xml and
import-test.sql files are used when running the TestNG unit tests against HSQLDB. The
database schema and the test data in import-test.sql is always exported to the database
before running tests. The myproject-dev-ds.xml, persistence-dev.xmland
import-dev.sql files are for use when deploying the application to your development
database. The schema might be exported automatically at deployment, depending upon whether you told seam-gen
that you are working with an existing database. The myproject-prod-ds.xml,
persistence-prod.xmland import-prod.sql files are for use when
deploying the application to your production database. The schema is not exported automatically at
deployment.
If you're used to traditional action-style web frameworks, you're probably wondering how you can create a simple web page with a stateless action method in Java. If you type:
seam new-action
Seam will prompt for some information, and generate a new facelets page and Seam component for your project.
C:\Projects\jboss-seam>seam new-action
Buildfile: build.xml
validate-workspace:
validate-project:
action-input:
[input] Enter the Seam component name
ping
[input] Enter the local interface name [Ping]
[input] Enter the bean class name [PingBean]
[input] Enter the action method name [ping]
[input] Enter the page name [ping]
setup-filters:
new-action:
[echo] Creating a new stateless session bean component with an action method
[copy] Copying 1 file to C:\Projects\helloworld\src\hot\org\jboss\helloworld
[copy] Copying 1 file to C:\Projects\helloworld\src\hot\org\jboss\helloworld
[copy] Copying 1 file to C:\Projects\helloworld\src\hot\org\jboss\helloworld\test
[copy] Copying 1 file to C:\Projects\helloworld\src\hot\org\jboss\helloworld\test
[copy] Copying 1 file to C:\Projects\helloworld\view
[echo] Type 'seam restart' and go to http://localhost:8080/helloworld/ping.seam
BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 13 seconds
C:\Projects\jboss-seam>Because we've added a new Seam component, we need to restart the exploded directory deployment. You can do
this by typing seam restart, or by running the restart target in the
generated project build.xml file from inside Eclipse. Another way to force a restart is
to edit the file resources/META-INF/application.xml in Eclipse. Note that you
do not need to restart JBoss each time you change the application.
Now go to http://localhost:8080/helloworld/ping.seam and click the button. You can see
the code behind this action by looking in the project src directory. Put a breakpoint in
the ping() method, and click the button again.
Finally, locate the PingTest.xml file in the test package and run the integration tests
using the TestNG plugin for Eclipse. Alternatively, run the tests using seam test or the
test target of the generated build.
The next step is to create a form. Type:
seam new-form
C:\Projects\jboss-seam>seam new-form
Buildfile: C:\Projects\jboss-seam\seam-gen\build.xml
validate-workspace:
validate-project:
action-input:
[input] Enter the Seam component name
hello
[input] Enter the local interface name [Hello]
[input] Enter the bean class name [HelloBean]
[input] Enter the action method name [hello]
[input] Enter the page name [hello]
setup-filters:
new-form:
[echo] Creating a new stateful session bean component with an action method
[copy] Copying 1 file to C:\Projects\hello\src\hot\com\hello
[copy] Copying 1 file to C:\Projects\hello\src\hot\com\hello
[copy] Copying 1 file to C:\Projects\hello\src\hot\com\hello\test
[copy] Copying 1 file to C:\Projects\hello\view
[copy] Copying 1 file to C:\Projects\hello\src\hot\com\hello\test
[echo] Type 'seam restart' and go to http://localhost:8080/hello/hello.seam
BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 5 seconds
C:\Projects\jboss-seam>Restart the application again, and go to http://localhost:8080/helloworld/hello.seam.
Then take a look at the generated code. Run the test. Try adding some new fields to the form and Seam
component (remember to restart the deployment each time you change the Java code).
Manually create some tables in your database. (If you need to switch to a different database, just run
seam setup again.) Now type:
seam generate-entities
Restart the deployment, and go to http://localhost:8080/helloworld. You can browse the
database, edit existing objects, and create new objects. If you look at the generated code, you'll probably
be amazed how simple it is! Seam was designed so that data access code is easy to write by hand, even for
people who don't want to cheat by using seam-gen.
Place your existing, valid entity classes inside the src/main. Now type
seam generate-ui
Restart the deployment, and go to http://localhost:8080/helloworld.
Finally, we want to be able to deploy the application using standard Java EE 5 packaging. First, we need
to remove the exploded directory by running seam unexplode. To deploy the EAR, we can
type seam deploy at the command prompt, or run the deploy target of
the generated project build script. You can undeploy using seam undeploy or the
undeploy target.
By default, the application will be deployed with the dev profile. The EAR will
include the persistence-dev.xml and import-dev.sql files, and the
myproject-dev-ds.xml file will be deployed. You can change the profile, and use the
prod profile, by typing
seam -Dprofile=prod deploy
You can even define new deployment profiles for your application. Just add appropriately named files to
your project—for example, persistence-staging.xml, import-staging.sql
and myproject-staging-ds.xml—and select the name of the profile using
-Dprofile=staging.
When you deploy your Seam application as an exploded directory, you'll get some support for incremental
hot deployment at development time. You need to enable debug mode in both Seam and Facelets, by adding this
line to components.xml:
<core:init debug="true">
Now, the following files may be redeployed without requiring a full restart of the web application:
any facelets page
any pages.xml file
But if we want to change any Java code, we still need to do a full restart of the application. (In JBoss
this may be accomplished by touching the top level deployment descriptor: application.xml
for an EAR deployment, or web.xml for a WAR deployment.)
But if you really want a fast edit/compile/test cycle, Seam supports incremental redeployment of JavaBean
components. To make use of this functionality, you must deploy the JavaBean components into the
WEB-INF/dev directory, so that they will be loaded by a special Seam classloader,
instead of by the WAR or EAR classloader.
You need to be aware of the following limitations:
the components must be JavaBean components, they cannot be EJB3 beans (we are working on fixing this limitation)
entities can never be hot-deployed
components deployed via components.xml may not be hot-deployed
the hot-deployable components will not be visible to any classes deployed outside of
WEB-INF/dev
Seam debug mode must be enabled and jboss-seam-debug.jar
must be in WEB-INF/lib
You must have the Seam filter installed in web.xml
You may see errors if the system is placed under any load and debug is enabled.
If you create a WAR project using seam-gen, incremental hot deployment is available out of the box for
classes in the src/hot source directory. However, seam-gen does not support
incremental hot deployment for EAR projects.
Seam 2.0 was developed for JavaServer Faces 1.2. When using JBoss AS, we recommend using JBoss 4.2 or JBoss 5.0, both of which bundle the JSF 1.2 reference implementation. However, it is still possible to use Seam 2.0 on the JBoss 4.0 platform. There are two basic steps required to do this: install an EJB3-enabled version of JBoss 4.0 and replace MyFaces with the JSF 1.2 reference implementation. Once you complete these steps, Seam 2.0 applications can be deployed to JBoss 4.0.
JBoss 4.0 does not ship a default configuration compatible with Seam. To run Seam, you must install JBoss 4.0.5 using the JEMS 1.2 installer with the ejb3 profile selected. Seam will not run with an installation that doesn't include EJB3 support. The JEMS installer can be downloaded from http://labs.jboss.com/jemsinstaller/downloads.
The web configuration for JBoss 4.0 can be found in the
server/default/deploy/jbossweb-tomcat55.sar. You'll need to delete
myfaces-api.jar any myfaces-impl.jar from the
jsf-libs directory. Then, you'll need to copy jsf-api.jar,
jsf-impl.jar, el-api.jar, and el-ri.jar
to that directory. The JSF JARs can be found in the Seam lib directory. The el JARs
can be obtained from the Seam 1.2 release.
You'll also need to edit the conf/web.xml, replacing
myfaces-impl.jar with jsf-impl.jar.
JBoss Tools is a collection of Eclipse plugins. JBoss Tools a project creation wizard for Seam, Content Assist for the Unified Expression Language (EL) in both facelets and Java code, a graphical editor for jPDL, a graphical editor for Seam configuration files, support for running Seam integration tests from within Eclipse, and much more.
In short, if you are an Eclipse user, then you'll want JBoss Tools!
JBoss Tools, as with seam-gen, works best with JBoss AS, but it's possible with a few tweaks to get your app running on other application servers. The changes are much like those described for seam-gen later in this reference manual.
Make sure you have JDK 5, JBoss AS 4.2 or 5.0, Eclipse 3.3, the JBoss Tools plugins (at least Seam Tools, the Visual Page Editor, jBPM Tools and JBoss AS Tools) and the TestNG plugin for Eclipse correctly installed before starting.
Please see the official JBoss Tools installation page for the quickest way to get JBoss Tools setup in Eclipse. You can also check out the Installing JBoss Tools page on the JBoss community wiki for the gory details and a set of alternative installation approaches.
Start up Eclipse and select the Seam perspective.
Go to File -> New -> Seam Web Project.

First, enter a name for your new project. For this tutorial, we're
going to use
helloworld
.
Now, we need to tell JBoss Tools about JBoss AS. In this example we are using JBoss AS 4.2, though you can certainly use JBoss AS 5.0 as well. Selecting JBoss AS is a two step process. First we need to define a runtime. Again, we'll choose JBoss AS 4.2 in this case:

Enter a name for the runtime, and locate it on your hard drive:

Next, we need to define a server JBoss Tools can deploy the project to. Make sure to again select JBoss AS 4.2, and also the runtime you just defined:

On the next screen give the server a name, and hit Finish:

Make sure the runtime and server you just created are selected, select Dynamic Web Project with Seam 2.0 (technology preview) and hit Next:

The next 3 screens allow you to further customize your new project, but for us the defaults are fine. So just hit Next until you reach the final screen.
The first step here is to tell JBoss Tools about the Seam download you want to use. Add a new Seam Runtime - make sure to give it a name, and select 2.0 as the version:

The most important choice you need to make is between EAR deployment and WAR deployment of your project. EAR projects support EJB 3.0 and require Java EE 5. WAR projects do not support EJB 3.0, but may be deployed to a J2EE environment. The packaging of a WAR is also simpler to understand. If you installed an EJB3-ready application server like JBoss, choose EAR. Otherwise, choose WAR. We'll assume that you've chosen a WAR deployment for the rest of the tutorial, but you can follow exactly the same steps for a EAR deployment.
Next, select your database type. We'll assume you have MySQL installed, with an existing schema. You'll need to tell JBoss Tools about the database, select MySQL as the database, and create a new connection profile. Select Generic JDBC Connection:

Give it a name:

JBoss Tools doesn't come with drivers for any databases, so you need to tell JBoss Tools where the MySQL JDBC driver is. Tell it about the driver by clicking ....
Locate MySQL 5, and hit Add...:

Choose the MySQL JDBC Driver template:

Locate the jar on your computer by choosing Edit Jar/Zip:

Review the username and password used to connect, and if correct, hit Ok.
Finally, choose the newly created driver:

If you are working with an existing data model, make sure you tell JBoss Tools that the tables already exist in the database.
Review the username and password used to connect, test the connection using the Test Connection button, and if it works, hit Finish:
Finally, review the package names for your generated beans, and if you are happy, click Finish:

JBoss has sophisticated support for hot re-deployment of WARs and EARs. Unfortunately, due to bugs in the JVM, repeated redeployment of an EAR—which is common during development—eventually causes the JVM to run out of perm gen space. For this reason, we recommend running JBoss in a JVM with a large perm gen space at development time. We suggest the following values:
-Xms512m -Xmx1024m -XX:PermSize=256m -XX:MaxPermSize=512
If you don't have so much memory available, the following is our minimum recommendation:
-Xms256m -Xmx512m -XX:PermSize=128m -XX:MaxPermSize=256
Locate the server in the JBoss Server View, right click on the server and select Edit Launch Configuration:

Then, alter the VM arguements:

If you don't want to bother with this stuff now, you don't have to—come
back to it later, when you get your first
OutOfMemoryException.
To start JBoss, and deploy the project, just right click on the server you created, and click Start, (or Debug to start in debug mode):

Don't get scared by the XML configuration documents that were generated into the project directory. They are mostly standard Java EE stuff, the stuff you need to create once and then never look at again, and they are 90% the same between all Seam projects.
If you're used to traditional action-style web frameworks, you're probably wondering how you can create a simple web page with a stateless action method in Java.
First, select New -> Seam Action:

Now, enter the name of the Seam component. JBoss Tools selects sensible defaults for other fields:

Finally, hit Finish.
Now go to http://localhost:8080/helloworld/ping.seam
and click the button. You can see the code behind this action by
looking in the project src directory. Put a
breakpoint in the ping() method, and click the
button again.
Finally, open the helloworld-test project, locate
PingTest class, right click on it, and choose
Run As -> TestNG Test:

The first step is to create a form. Select New -> Seam Form:

Now, enter the name of the Seam component. JBoss Tools selects sensible defaults for other fields:

Go to http://localhost:8080/helloworld/hello.seam.
Then take a look at the generated code. Run the test. Try adding some
new fields to the form and Seam component (note, you don't need to
restart the app server each time you change the code in
src/action as Seam hot reloads the component for
you Section 3.6, “Seam and incremental hot deployment with JBoss Tools”).
Manually create some tables in your database. (If you need to switch to a different database, create a new project, and select the correct database). Then, select New -> Seam Generate Entities:

JBoss Tools gives you the option to either reverse engineer entities, components and views from a database schema or to reverse engineer components and views from existing JPA entities. We're going to do Reverse engieneer from database.
Restart the deployment:

Then go to http://localhost:8080/helloworld. You can
browse the database, edit existing objects, and create new objects. If
you look at the generated code, you'll probably be amazed how simple it
is! Seam was designed so that data access code is easy to write by
hand, even for people who don't want to cheat by using reverse
engineering.
JBoss Tools supports incremental hot deployment of:
any facelets page
any pages.xml file
out of the box.
But if we want to change any Java code, we still need to do a full restart of the application by doing a Full Publish.
But if you really want a fast edit/compile/test cycle, Seam supports
incremental redeployment of JavaBean components. To make use of this
functionality, you must deploy the JavaBean components into the
WEB-INF/dev directory, so that they will be loaded
by a special Seam classloader, instead of by the WAR or EAR
classloader.
You need to be aware of the following limitations:
the components must be JavaBean components, they cannot be EJB3 beans (we are working on fixing this limitation)
entities can never be hot-deloyed
components deployed via components.xml may not
be hot-deployed
the hot-deployable components will not be visible to any classes
deployed outside of WEB-INF/dev
Seam debug mode must be enabled and
jboss-seam-debug.jar must be in
WEB-INF/lib
You must have the Seam filter installed in web.xml
You may see errors if the system is placed under any load and debug is enabled.
If you create a WAR project using JBoss Tools, incremental hot deployment
is available out of the box for classes in the
src/action source directory. However, JBoss Tools
does not support incremental hot deployment for EAR projects.
The two core concepts in Seam are the notion of a context and the notion of a component. Components are stateful objects, usually EJBs, and an instance of a component is associated with a context, and given a name in that context. Bijection provides a mechanism for aliasing internal component names (instance variables) to contextual names, allowing component trees to be dynamically assembled, and reassembled by Seam.
Let's start by describing the contexts built in to Seam.
Seam contexts are created and destroyed by the framework. The application does not control context demarcation via explicit Java API calls. Context are usually implicit. In some cases, however, contexts are demarcated via annotations.
The basic Seam contexts are:
Stateless context
Event (i.e., request) context
Page context
Conversation context
Session context
Business process context
Application context
You will recognize some of these contexts from servlet and related specifications. However, two of them might be new to you: conversation context, and business process context. One reason state management in web applications is so fragile and error-prone is that the three built-in contexts (request, session and application) are not especially meaningful from the point of view of the business logic. A user login session, for example, is a fairly arbitrary construct in terms of the actual application work flow. Therefore, most Seam components are scoped to the conversation or business process contexts, since they are the contexts which are most meaningful in terms of the application.
Let's look at each context in turn.
Components which are truly stateless (stateless session beans, primarily) always live in the stateless context (which is basically the absense of a context since the instance Seam resolves is not stored). Stateless components are not very interesting, and are arguably not very object-oriented. Nevertheless, they do get developed and used and are thus an important part of any Seam application.
The event context is the "narrowest" stateful context, and is a generalization of the notion of the web request context to cover other kinds of events. Nevertheless, the event context associated with the lifecycle of a JSF request is the most important example of an event context, and the one you will work with most often. Components associated with the event context are destroyed at the end of the request, but their state is available and well-defined for at least the lifecycle of the request.
When you invoke a Seam component via RMI, or Seam Remoting, the event context is created and destroyed just for the invocation.
The page context allows you to associate state with a particular instance of a rendered page. You can initialize state in your event listener, or while actually rendering the page, and then have access to it from any event that originates from that page. This is especially useful for functionality like clickable lists, where the list is backed by changing data on the server side. The state is actually serialized to the client, so this construct is extremely robust with respect to multi-window operation and the back button.
The conversation context is a truly central concept in Seam. A conversation is a unit of work from the point of view of the user. It might span several interactions with the user, several requests, and several database transactions. But to the user, a conversation solves a single problem. For example, "book hotel", "approve contract", "create order" are all conversations. You might like to think of a conversation implementing a single "use case" or "user story", but the relationship is not necessarily quite exact.
A conversation holds state associated with "what the user is doing now, in this window". A single user may have multiple conversations in progress at any point in time, usually in multiple windows. The conversation context allows us to ensure that state from the different conversations does not collide and cause bugs.
It might take you some time to get used to thinking of applications in terms of conversations. But once you get used to it, we think you'll love the notion, and never be able to not think in terms of conversations again!
Some conversations last for just a single request. Conversations that span multiple requests must be demarcated using annotations provided by Seam.
Some conversations are also tasks. A task is a conversation that is significant in terms of a long-running business process, and has the potential to trigger a business process state transition when it is successfully completed. Seam provides a special set of annotations for task demarcation.
Conversations may be nested, with one conversation taking place "inside" a wider conversation. This is an advanced feature.
Usually, conversation state is actually held by Seam in the servlet session between requests. Seam implements configurable conversation timeout, automatically destroying inactive conversations, and thus ensuring that the state held by a single user login session does not grow without bound if the user abandons conversations.
Seam serializes processing of concurrent requests that take place in the same long-running conversation context, in the same process.
Alternatively, Seam may be configured to keep conversational state in the client browser.
A session context holds state associated with the user login session. While there are some cases where it is useful to share state between several conversations, we generally frown on the use of session context for holding components other than global information about the logged in user.
In a JSR-168 portal environment, the session context represents the portlet session.
The business process context holds state associated with the long running business process. This state is managed and made persistent by the BPM engine (JBoss jBPM). The business process spans multiple interactions with multiple users, so this state is shared between multiple users, but in a well-defined manner. The current task determines the current business process instance, and the lifecycle of the business process is defined externally using a process definition language, so there are no special annotations for business process demarcation.
The application context is the familiar servlet context from the servlet spec. Application context is mainly useful for holding static information such as configuration data, reference data or metamodels. For example, Seam stores its own configuration and metamodel in the application context.
A context defines a namespace, a set of context variables. These work much the same as session or request attributes in the servlet spec. You may bind any value you like to a context variable, but usually we bind Seam component instances to context variables.
So, within a context, a component instance is identified by the context variable name (this is
usually, but not always, the same as the component name). You may programatically access a named
component instance in a particular scope via the Contexts class, which provides
access to several thread-bound instances of the Context interface:
User user = (User) Contexts.getSessionContext().get("user");
You may also set or change the value associated with a name:
Contexts.getSessionContext().set("user", user);
Usually, however, we obtain components from a context via injection, and put component instances into a context via outjection.
Sometimes, as above, component instances are obtained from a particular known scope. Other times, all stateful scopes are searched, in priority order. The order is as follows:
Event context
Page context
Conversation context
Session context
Business process context
Application context
You can perform a priority search by calling Contexts.lookupInStatefulContexts().
Whenever you access a component by name from a JSF page, a priority search occurs.
Neither the servlet nor EJB specifications define any facilities for managing concurrent requests originating from the same client. The servlet container simply lets all threads run concurrently and leaves enforcing threadsafeness to application code. The EJB container allows stateless components to be accessed concurrently, and throws an exception if multiple threads access a stateful session bean.
This behavior might have been okay in old-style web applications which were based around fine-grained, synchronous requests. But for modern applications which make heavy use of many fine-grained, asynchronous (AJAX) requests, concurrency is a fact of life, and must be supported by the programming model. Seam weaves a concurrency management layer into its context model.
The Seam session and application contexts are multithreaded. Seam will allow concurrent requests in a context to be processed concurrently. The event and page contexts are by nature single threaded. The business process context is strictly speaking multi-threaded, but in practice concurrency is sufficiently rare that this fact may be disregarded most of the time. Finally, Seam enforces a single thread per conversation per process model for the conversation context by serializing concurrent requests in the same long-running conversation context.
Since the session context is multithreaded, and often contains volatile state, session scope
components are always protected by Seam from concurrent access so long as the Seam interceptors
are not disabled for that component. If interceptors are disabled, then any thread-safety that is
required must be implemented by the component itself. Seam serializes requests to session
scope session beans and JavaBeans by default (and detects and breaks any deadlocks that occur). This is
not the default behaviour for application scoped components however, since application scoped components
do not usually hold volatile state and because synchronization at the global level is
extremely expensive. However, you can force a serialized threading model on any
session bean or JavaBean component by adding the @Synchronized annotation.
This concurrency model means that AJAX clients can safely use volatile session and conversational state, without the need for any special work on the part of the developer.
Seam components are POJOs (Plain Old Java Objects). In particular, they are JavaBeans or EJB 3.0 enterprise beans. While Seam does not require that components be EJBs and can even be used without an EJB 3.0 compliant container, Seam was designed with EJB 3.0 in mind and includes deep integration with EJB 3.0. Seam supports the following component types.
EJB 3.0 stateless session beans
EJB 3.0 stateful session beans
EJB 3.0 entity beans (i.e., JPA entity classes)
JavaBeans
EJB 3.0 message-driven beans
Spring beans (see Chapter 27, Spring Framework integration)
Stateless session bean components are not able to hold state across multiple invocations. Therefore, they usually work by operating upon the state of other components in the various Seam contexts. They may be used as JSF action listeners, but cannot provide properties to JSF components for display.
Stateless session beans always live in the stateless context.
Stateless session beans can be accessed concurrently as a new instance is used for each request. Assigning the instance to the request is the responsibility of the EJB3 container (normally instances will be allocated from a reusable pool meaning that you may find any instance variables contain data from previous uses of the bean).
Stateless session beans are the least interesting kind of Seam component.
Seam stateless session bean components may be instantiated using Component.getInstance()
or @In(create=true). They should not be directly instantiated via JNDI lookup
or the new operator.
Stateful session bean components are able to hold state not only across multiple invocations of the
bean, but also across multiple requests. Application state that does not belong in the database should
usually be held by stateful session beans. This is a major difference between Seam and many other web
application frameworks. Instead of sticking information about the current conversation directly in the
HttpSession, you should keep it in instance variables of a stateful session bean
that is bound to the conversation context. This allows Seam to manage the lifecycle of this state for
you, and ensure that there are no collisions between state relating to different concurrent
conversations.
Stateful session beans are often used as JSF action listener, and as backing beans that provide properties to JSF components for display or form submission.
By default, stateful session beans are bound to the conversation context. They may never be bound to the page or stateless contexts.
Concurrent requests to session-scoped stateful session beans are always serialized by Seam as long as the Seam interceptors are not disabled for the bean.
Seam stateful session bean components may be instantiated using Component.getInstance()
or @In(create=true). They should not be directly instantiated via JNDI lookup
or the new operator.
Entity beans may be bound to a context variable and function as a seam component. Because entities have a persistent identity in addition to their contextual identity, entity instances are usually bound explicitly in Java code, rather than being instantiated implicitly by Seam.
Entity bean components do not support bijection or context demarcation. Nor does invocation of an entity bean trigger validation.
Entity beans are not usually used as JSF action listeners, but do often function as backing beans that provide properties to JSF components for display or form submission. In particular, it is common to use an entity as a backing bean, together with a stateless session bean action listener to implement create/update/delete type functionality.
By default, entity beans are bound to the conversation context. They may never be bound to the stateless context.
Note that it in a clustered environment is somewhat less efficient to bind an entity bean directly to a conversation or session scoped Seam context variable than it would be to hold a reference to the entity bean in a stateful session bean. For this reason, not all Seam applications define entity beans to be Seam components.
Seam entity bean components may be instantiated using Component.getInstance(),
@In(create=true) or directly using the new operator.
Javabeans may be used just like a stateless or stateful session bean. However, they do not provide the functionality of a session bean (declarative transaction demarcation, declarative security, efficient clustered state replication, EJB 3.0 persistence, timeout methods, etc).
In a later chapter, we show you how to use Seam and Hibernate without an EJB container. In this use case, components are JavaBeans instead of session beans. Note, however, that in many application servers it is somewhat less efficient to cluster conversation or session scoped Seam JavaBean components than it is to cluster stateful session bean components.
By default, JavaBeans are bound to the event context.
Concurrent requests to session-scoped JavaBeans are always serialized by Seam.
Seam JavaBean components may be instantiated using Component.getInstance()
or @In(create=true). They should not be directly instantiated using the
new operator.
Message-driven beans may function as a seam component. However, message-driven beans are called quite differently to other Seam components - instead of invoking them via the context variable, they listen for messages sent to a JMS queue or topic.
Message-driven beans may not be bound to a Seam context. Nor do they have access to the session or conversation state of their "caller". However, they do support bijection and some other Seam functionality.
Message-driven beans are never instantiated by the application. They are instantiated by the EJB container when a message is received.
In order to perform its magic (bijection, context demarcation, validation, etc), Seam must intercept component invocations. For JavaBeans, Seam is in full control of instantiation of the component, and no special configuration is needed. For entity beans, interception is not required since bijection and context demarcation are not defined. For session beans, we must register an EJB interceptor for the session bean component. We could use an annotation, as follows:
@Stateless
@Interceptors(SeamInterceptor.class)
public class