[seam-dev] a modest seam-gen style upgrade

Wed Oct 8 18:51:06 EDT 2008

You may have noticed by now that seam-gen has gotten a modest style
upgrade in the trunk. This upgrade is based on "style mods" I have
been maintaining while working on the source code for Seam in Action
(I had to dress up the screenshots for the show). Understand that this
is just a first step in making seam-gen applications look more
presentable, but nonetheless, and important first step.

Below is a list of the enhancements (perhaps something worth blogging about):

1. Added a favicon of the Seam logo
  - personally, I think this is the coolest and simplest enhancement
  - by the way, we should consider use this favicon for
seamframework.org because I made it transparent
2. Icons for each level of error message (warn, error, info)
3. Stripped the border and background from global messages and fixed
the indenting to accommodate the icons
  - the messages were still using the style from the original orange
theme seam-gen projects had
4. Used a RichFaces XCSS resource so that the theme matches the
currently selected RichFaces theme
  - I also applied some of the RichFaces gradients to form controls to
make the forms look better (w/ very little CSS)

The only downside of the new theme is that the Visual Editor in
JBossTools doesn't understand the XCSS file (which resides in the
stylesheets directory). Therefore, I left behind the old theme.css and
put an instruction in template.xhtml about switching to the static
theme.css for previews. It would be great if the Visual Editor could
interpret the XCSS file. This opens up so much flexibility for
extending the RichFaces theme.

The commit also came with some other goodies:

1. seam-gen WAR projects now have a consolidated compile target
2. two new targets reexplode and redeploy, which do a clean unexplode
explode or clean undeploy deploy, respectively
3. restart now detects if you have deployed an exploded or packaged
archive and restarts it appropriately (before it bombed if you had a
packaged archive deployed)
4. EAR projects now compile groovy scripts on the classpath (deploying
raw .groovy files requires more research)
5. Added a "head" named insertion in the template.xhtml so that you
can add additional markup in <head> on a per-page basis
6. Global messages now reside in template.xhtml with a Facelets
parameter you can use to turn them off on a per-page basis
7. Changed src/action to src/hot and src/model to src/main
8. Added the view folder to the classpath for tests so that page
actions defined in *.page.xml are invoked during testing (previously
the tests only read the global pages.xml file)
9. Added a javadoc task to the build
10. The default username is admin and the password is blank.
Developers never got to see the failure login scenario out of the box
because we let any credentials through (obviously, with the new
security stuff, we don't even need the authenticator component, but
that is a next step perhaps)

All in all, what these upgrades should do is make your demos of Seam
look just a touch prettier and give you a few more wrenches for
development. There are still plenty of improvements that could be
made.

-Dan

-- 
Dan Allen
Software consultant | Author of Seam in Action

http://mojavelinux.com
http://mojavelinux.com/seaminaction

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