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Chapter 1. Introduction

1.1. What is Seam?
1.2. Key Features of JBoss Seam

This introduction will help you to understand what is Seam.

Seam is a fully featured application framework on top of Java EE 5. It is also one of the most popular enterprise Java frameworks today. Seam deeply integrates many other standard-based or open source frameworks (e.g., JSF, EJB3, JMS, Web Services, jBPM, JBoss Rules, Ajax4jsf, RichFaces, Facelets, Spring, iText, Quartz, TestNG, etc.), and provides a single programming model for developers to "drive" those underlying frameworks via simple annotated POJOs (Plain Old Java Objects). It makes life easier for developers to tackle complex enterprise applications with many component frameworks.

For a start, we propose you to look through the table of main features of JBoss Seam:

Table 1.1. Key Functionality for JBoss Seam

FeatureBenefitChapter

Integrated JSF with EJB 3.0

JBoss Seam combines the component models of EJB3 and JSF, eliminating glue code, and thus, letting the developer think about the business problem.

 

Integrated AJAX

Developer can add AJAX capability to the user interface of his application without the need to write any JavaScript code as Seam supports JBoss RichFaces and ICEfaces - the best open source JSF-based AJAX solutions.

 

Bijection

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.

 

New Seam Project wizard

An easy step-by-step wizard to create a stand alone Seam Web Project with a form to create runtime and server instances in order to get started creating, running, and debugging J2EE (only) applications. You may also add JSF capabilities.

Chapter 2, Creating a New Seam Project via the New Seam Project wizard

Seam component generations options

All the Seam component generations options known from Seam-gen are available as wizards (with sensible auto-defaulting) for creating various common Seam components.

Chapter 6, Seam Wizards

Seam Editors

Visual Page Editor, Seam Pages Editor and Seam Components Editor provide you with a range of great possibilities and will be helpful when working with JBoss Seam.

Chapter 8, Seam Editors

Seam Validator

A configured Seam Validator provides validation of various possible problematic definitions.

Section 8.4.4, “Seam Validation”

CRUD Database Application Generation

JBoss Seam allows adding CRUD support to a Seam Web application.

Chapter 13, Generate a CRUD Database Application

TestNG Framework

TestNG ("Testing, the Next Generation") is a Java unit testing framework that aims to overcome many limitations of JUnit.

Chapter 15, What is TestNG?