A few days ago JbBoss announced the beta release of a new EJB3 and JSF based application framework: SEAM. Yet another framework? Should I invest some time or just ignore it like all the others that came along the last one and a half year?

An interesting post on the groupblog of Hibernate opened my eyes and answered my question. Gavin King is behind this framework (One of the smartest moves of JBoss founder Marc Fleury was to contract the hibernate guy) and when Gavin is behind something, at least you’ll be able to find some interesting writings of his hand.

So I deceided to give it a try, followed the tutorial and found myself in regular JBoss stacktraces within minutes. Failure after failure. Somehow JBoss and I do go hand in hand conceptually but as soon as we’re getting pragmatic I’m lost in evergrowing error logs. Meanwhile I was reading all available documents I found about SEAM and fortunate, Gavin found himself some time to write some decent material (Especially chapter 2 of the reference guide is worth some investigation). Although my first experiments failed completely, Gavin convinced me SEAM might bring back EJB to the development floor.

Why? Simply simplicity! Old style EJB is both overwhelming complex and not realy developer friendly in usage. Well the new EJB3 spec is still overwhelming complex but most of this complexity is well hidden for the regular developer. And SEAM brings just that extra facade on top to hide it completely. Another reason: Seamless integration with JSF. With SEAM, using JSF feels like a breeze.

So will SEAM replace Spring like Spring replaced the usage of old dirty EJB’s?? No idea but I’m sure someone is going to write a book ‘Look mam, J2EE *with* EJB’s’ and what will follow is whatever follows the hype. Untill then I’ll try to get something useful out of SEAM and come back to this blog later on.

P.S. Complete offtopic but the only reason I started investigating this framework is because SEAM is just one of my favorite alternative indiestyle pop bands of the ’90s.