[seam-dev] Seam University

[Shane Bryzak]

Now that the Seam final release has been out for about a week (and I've 
had a chance to gather my wits), I've been thinking a bit about what we 
should do with the seamframework.org web site.  I think that we're all 
in agreement that we need to do something, however the devil is in the 
details - it's plain to me that we can't do a straight migration of all 
content to the jboss.org community site and still retain all the value 
that the current site provides.

Essentially, the contents of the site can be broken down into a few 
categories:

1. Forums
2. Knowledgebase
3. Marketing
4. Reference - links to documentation, downloads, Maven artifacts, etc

I believe that 1, 3 and 4 are the types of content that we can 
successfully host on the jboss.org infrastructure (still accessible from 
www.seamframework.org), in a similar way that hibernate.org does it.  
What I don't believe that we can host there is the knowledgebase.  I 
think that this is one area where we're currently failing our community, 
and that we have the potential to make vast improvements on.

This is where Seam University comes in.  My vision for this is to build 
a site that is run with the same collaborative community effort that has 
exploded into existence as a result of Seam 3.  This would be a site 
where Seam users could submit their own articles, tutorials and tips for 
using Seam, and have it properly indexed via a powerful keyword search 
algorithm (this bit is quite important).  I know we have in.relation.to, 
but the problem with this site is a) only a select few can submit 
content to it, b) new content falls off the radar quite quickly and c) 
it's mainly centered around product announcements.

As for hosting this, my preference would be to use Google App Engine so 
that the site could double up in purpose as being a showcase of CDI/Seam 
technology in the cloud.

Anyway, these are my initial thoughts on this subject and I would really 
love to hear some feedback on these ideas.  So don't be shy to let me 
know what you think. :)

Shane