Submitted by Matt Raible on Tue, 2006-06-13 15:35.
It's great to see the release of Seam 1.0. Seam is similar to many full-stack frameworks like Rails, Rife and AppFuse in that it gives you all the pieces you'll need to build a kick-ass web application.
I've blogged my thoughts on Seam before, so there's no need to do that again. I like the idea, especially the lack of interfaces and the 3-files-for-each page idea. However, I don't know that this concept will fly with Java developers. I agree there's a need to simplify, but many of us are mesmerized by the de-coupling that Spring gives us. So now we're programming to interfaces, and every-so-often swapping implementations. I don't know that we can switch to this simpler model. And then there's the "EJB" thing. I think there will be a fair amount of developers that don't use EJB3 simply because it has the "EJB" name. The best thing the EJB Expert Group could have done for EJB3 would be to give it a new name.
The other thing I worry about with Seam is that it wasn't developed from an existing application. AFAIK, it didn't get extracted from a real-world application that had all the problems that Seam solves. I know that Gavin is a smart guy, and he's probably seen these problems in the real world, but there's nothing like developing a real-world application with a technology - and then extracting the framework from that.
In reality, I'm probably jealous. Seam has some really cool features, JBoss has done a great job of marketing it, and it seems to be a really cool way to develop applications. If I'm going to make AppFuse a direct competitor to Seam, it's gonna be quite the uphill battle.
I looked at the seam reference documentation and i'm impressed with the simplicity seam provides. I agree with Matt's comment on EJB. By now Lot of us are allergic to EJB because of Hibernate and its ironic that Gavin is now using EJB for SEAM.
One clear advantage FOR Seam over other frameworks..
Simplicity.
JSP ==> EJB ==> DATABASE
A lot of junior developers and beginners will benefit from this approach, as it takes a little bit of effort for a SPRING - HIBERNATE application to get off ground.
I do not have any experience in Seam besides reading the documentation, but I did want to comment on the 3 files per page. Once the Eclipse plugins catch up, this should not be a big deal. I'm thinking a similar model to the way Visual Studio displays code behind files. I've also thought about an Eclipse plugin for Spring MVC that would group views in a tree under their actions based on the mapping strategy.
I think that Appfuse is not a competitor of Seam. Appfuse is more a sample application then a *framework*. So, Appfuse can still help a huge number of java developer to get started with java enterprise development. Maybe offering Seam too in its chioce of technologies, and adding a value in explaining the development of a "real" web application: security, web design integration, user management, SSO, remember me functionality and much more.
If you instead think of a war to Seam, then take in consideration to integrate Google Web Toolkit, because it is very promising and I think it invalidates the JSF model, on which Seam is based on.
A sample application on how to split the state management part on the client and part on the database using GWT + JPA + maybe Spring??? would be very cooool ;)