Adam Jordens@littlesquare:~/

I had a few days off from work over the holidays and decided to do a bit of an investigation into Gavin King’s new web framework, Seam.

My recent background has predominantly been in the J2EE space (Spring + Hibernate 3.0/3.2) but fronted with a thick Swing application as opposed to the typical web application. I’ve played with Ruby on Rails in the recent past and have built a number of Struts-based applications in years passed.

I didn’t particularly get very deep into the framework in the couple days I spent with it but I did leave with a favourable opinion. If nothing else it strikes as one of the better structured and maintainable application frameworks. I did this initial development stint in IntelliJ IDEA which as far as I could tell didn’t have much support for Seam (as opposed to Eclipse?). I found Seam’s Rails-like generators to be a useful starting point but the generated code didn’t necessarily mesh with what the documentation and tutorials covered. I generated the first few artifacts but quickly fell back to manual generation once I got the hang of the expected layout and structure.

The notions of conversations are interesting and something I’ll be considering in my day-to-day development. I’m particularly interested in the caching implications. I’ve found it difficult to consistently cache data model entities and ensure that they remain up to date across the network. With a conversationally scoped cache you would get some benefits of caching (in our application you may make multiple requests for the same data over the course of a conversation) without having to worry _as much_ about overall consistently. Of course it’s still a concern but your scope is ultimately limited to a shorter time frame.

A Seam-based application is particularly easy to refactor. Unique identifiers are assigned to application artifacts (session beans, entities, etc.) using the @Name annotation. These identifiers act as the point of reference rather than a physical object on the classpath so you’re free to refactor without a need to update XML files or other such references. A refreshing change from something like Struts.

That’s it for now. Work has started up and early indications are that 2007 should be an interesting year. Hopefully I’ll get back to Seam when things calm down a bit.