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.
September 27th, 2005 at 2:24 pm
It is a shame that if someone takes a look around another framework is invented that is better then the rest. I would be very nice to have 1 �ber framework..
September 27th, 2005 at 8:00 pm
On one hand I agree it would be better to have one uberframework, on the other, progression is an aspect you simply can’t ignore. Every framework has its weak and strong points and every framework is targeted to solve a specific problem. One uberframework should cover all to get accepted as the God of frameworks. Otherwise people will still invent their own stuff and release it as opensource where it gets picked up by blogging disciples and before you know get hyped up to heaven or beyond.
So is there room for SEAM with those other frameworks (Spring!) around. Yep I think so, when you’re going EJB3 and JSF, probably for well thought reasons, SEAM might be the throttle you’re looking for.
December 17th, 2006 at 10:47 pm
One uberframework should cover all to get accepted as the God of frameworks. - nice