Chapter 17. Introducing JBoss Seam

In this last chapter, we show you the JBoss Seam framework. Seam is an innovative new framework for web application development with the Java EE 5.0 platform. Seam brings two new standards, JavaServer Faces (JSF) and EJB 3.0, much closer together, by unifying their component and programming models. Most attractive for developers who rely on Hibernate (or any Java Persistence provider in EJB 3.0) is Seam's automatic persistence context management and the first-class constructs it provides for the definition of conversations in the application flow. If you've ever seen a LazyInitializationException in your Hibernate application, Seam has the right solutions.

There is much more to be said about Seam, and we encourage you to read this chapter even if you already made a decision for a different framework or if you aren't writing a web application. Although Seam currently targets web applications and also relies on JSF as a presentation framework, other options should be available in the future (you can already use Ajax calls to access Seam components, for example). Furthermore, many central concepts of Seam are currently being standardized and brought back into the Java EE 5.0 platform with the Web Beans JSR 299 (http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=299).

There are many ways to explain Seam and equally many ways to learn Seam. In this chapter, we first look at the problems Seam promises to solve; then, we discuss various solutions and highlight the features that are most appealing to you as a Hibernate user.