EJB3 succeeds wildly at simplifying the EJB tier, but one criticism of EJB3 is that its features are only available to proper EJB3 beans. What about the rest of your application?

Seam is a new open source application framework that provides a unified component model for all layers of your application. In Seam, presentation–tier components and business–tier components are the same type of thing, giving you complete flexibility in how you architect and layer your application.

Seam provides declarative state management, allowing components to focus on their core concerns, rather than on how values are shuttled to/from HTTP request and session state. Seam even provides additional context options, including a conversation context, where Seam manages state along a series of requests, and business process context, where Seam allows your components to participate in business processes spanning multiple sessions.

In this talk, I'll explain these core Seam concepts, show an application written using Seam (using EJB3, JavaServer Faces, Facelets and jBPM), and talk about how I think these facets of enterprise application development will continue to change over the coming year.

Presented by Norman Richards

Sponsored by JBoss, Inc.