EJB 3.0 + JSF = JBoss Seam

Craig McClanahan, creator of JSF and Struts, sparked my interest in JBoss Seam at the September CZJUG meeting.

One advantage of Seam is that JSF components can connect directly to session beans (action listeners) and entity beans (the model) without writing a controller in the MVC sense. The controller’s function is handled through annotations, rather than any magic.

Seam aims to provide an effective way to join EJB 3.0 and JSF, so it is intended specifically for building web applications. It offers a great deal, including conversation management and page-flow definitions. I recommend exploring Seam. If you do not fancy the manual, which is actually quite good, and want a quick overview, try Thomas Heut’s article JBoss Seam.

Incidentally, none other than Hibernate’s father Gavin King is behind Seam. Another interesting point: although it uses EJB 3.0, Seam can also run in Tomcat.