[jboss-user] [JBoss Seam] - Re: Seam and Portal Future

[bsmithjj]

"swestbom" wrote : What is missing from seam applications is independent state maintenance for the various portlets on the page.  We have many applications that we want to bring together under one site.  These sites are all intranet based so the weight isn't as much of an issue (this can be ameliorated to a considerable degree).  
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  | Also, where appropriate, we use traditional MVC (Sorry, not yours Gavin) and AJAX within portlets to deal with weight and avoid having to rebuild the whole page when an action is called within a portlet, so it is a hybrid. 
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  | I really don't think that portlets are a big pain because I am not using seam to build them, I use that XML crazy other framework that Gavin King loves to take cracks at.

On state maintenance - your statement is flat out wrong - I'm going to sound like a Seam salesman, but Seam has one of the best state mgmt. capabilities available in Java-web frameworks.  Your problem of tying state to individual regions on a page can be realized in a Seam architecture by using Stateful Session Beans (EJB3) that are associated to a particular conversation for a user-page interaction.  In Seam, every component associated with a conversation exists as long as the conversation it's tied to exists.  Having experience with both Portals and Seam, I'm going to say that my impression is that Seam's state-mgmt. is better;  it's there working for you in an unobtrusive way, but it has hooks that allow you to perform sophisticated state mgmt. when necessary.

JSF apps are much easier to 'do Ajax with' than portlet apps - plain and simple.  You have the options of letting a JSF component set (like ICEFaces) do the Ajax for you, use something like Seam remoting, do your own Ajax requests, etc...  

By 'XML crazy other framework' do you mean Spring?  --- IMHO - if we were still stuck with EJB 2.X/1.X and Java 1.4 or earlier, then Spring is a great way to build up your application infrastructure.  Now that we have Java 5 annotations and JEE - EJB3 with JPA, a lot of the infrastructure difficulty that Spring was created to simplify is gone.  Thus, if you can use Java 5 and the EJB3/JPA stuff for your apps, the value of using Spring goes way down.  The Seam bijection annotations and annotations like @Resource in EJB3 make life so much easier and saner as a JEE developer.

Regards,
Brad Smith



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