Customer Reviews

Practical JBoss Seam Projects (Expert's Voice)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
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I purchased this book after previewing several other books and online resources in order to get up to speed on both the overall architecture of Seam and get a good concrete hands-on ramp up of the technology for a development project I'm currently working on to transition from a proprietary J2EE MVC application to a Seam-based system.

Farley's approach to establishing a base application using standard JavaEE technologies and API's (JSF, EJB3, POJO gluecode/configs) and then walking the reader through the migration and enhancement of said application with Seam is very well delivered and serves to illustrate both the benefits of Seam as well as provide an understanding of why various aspects of Seam exist (e.g. annotation-and/or-configuration for component binding, enhancement to the JSF response lifecycle, the conversation context and application flow/BPM, etc.). By taking this "Practical" approach, I was able to rapidly get up to speed on the core principles of Seam and move past the usual configuration/familiarization thrash that one encounters when learning a new framework.

The book's presentation is a comfortable conversational style but still well structured and the author takes the time to review and reference core concepts without the burden of diving too deep into the foundational technologies (which can be better researched in their own volumes/sites/forums).

The only criticism I have is lightness on describing how to implement Facelets in Seam, but given that the JSF foundation is largely identical to a stock JSF implementation, it's a smooth configuration tweak to start using said technology with Seam (read: Google it).

Highly recommended to anyone who already has a working knowledge of JEE5 and the core technologies as well as a great primer for what will be baked into JEE6 in the near future.

This book is an introduction to Seam for experienced Java developers. At only 217 pages in eight chapters this book is relatively short and to the point. The first half of the book includes an essential overview, installation and configuration of the framework (as of v.1.2.1), binding JSF pages to EJBs, and managing conversation contexts. The second half of the book covers `ancilliary' Seam services including using jPDL for modal pageflows like wizards, user authentication and authorization, persistent workflow support and support for AJAX components using remoting services implemented on the client side using JavaScript and on the server side with Java.

Seam requires Java 5 and leverages JSF and EJB 3: this book does not cover these underlying technologies, instead you will need other books to understand them. Ironically it's Seam's ability to simplify integrating EJBs with JSF that makes it interesting to developers that may not have bothered to use EJBs previously. Using more advanced Seam security features also requires using Facelets, which is not covered in any depth either.

As an enterprise Java developer Seam is interesting to me as an evolution from Struts and then plain JSF. User authentication and authorization is explained well and conversation contexts appear great for improving complex web application behaviour. The section on jBPM has only a brief mention of BPEL and the section on AJAX support is more for developers of component libraries like ICEfaces, itself a compelling reason to learn Seam. The example code accompanying the book was written and tested with Seam 1.2.1 and JBoss 4.0.5 which are already outdated, but at under $5 from an Amazon partner this was a bargain.

As the name applies, this book is OK for looking at some specific projects using JBoss Seam; however, some parts that I think should be there are not. Red Hat has JBoss Developer that works great for their SEAM product howeve this boo metions nothing about using that studio or even that it exists. I would expect a book such as this would at least have an appendix that would explain the developer studio, setup and running under the JBoss Server. This is why I could not give it 5 stars. This aside, the examples are rather specific and complete and you can certainly save yourself time by downloading the source code from the [...] website. In fact you can even purchase an electonic copy of the book [...] for those that own the printed copy. On the second to last page of this book is the information that you need to go online, purchase the online version (using your CC or PayPal) and then download it to your PC. Since I run around a good deal, I bought this electronic copy and then placed it on my flas (thumb) drive that I carry everywhere. This way I am never without the material. This book is good for those already familiar with the basics of SEAM but if you need some beginning information try the other book from Apress called "Pratical JBoss Seam: From Novice to Professional."