Michael Hüttermann: IntelliJ IDEA 8 First EAP: JBoss Seam Support

Since a couple of days the first EAP of IntelliJ IDEA 8 is available. It contains many nice new features. One nice feature is the Seam support. JBoss Seam is an application framework which integrates Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), Java Server Faces (JSF), Enterprise Java Beans (EJB3), Java Portlets and Business Process Management (BPM). Seam drives an uniform component model which avoids the distinction between presentation tier components and business logic components. It extends the basic functionality of those standards .. in the area of JSF e.g. with conversations.

JBoss provides several examples for Seam .. e.g. the Booking example. This example is based on Seam 2.0, EJB 3.0, JSF 1.2, Hibernate 3 and Facelets. With this booking Web 2.0 application you can register, login, search hotels and book them.

Formats and meta-informations are annotated in the Entity Beans directly e.g. input length, required fields, pattern and are propagated to the UI seamlessly. The example uses some nice UI components like the date picker and the real-time search. The Web 2.0 and JSF friend has much fun with that.

IntelliJ IDEA provides a very good Seam support including Find Usages, Refactorings (Rename ..), Inspections and code completion (e.g. with EL value and method binding) across the artifacts. The navigation rules from pages.xml are visualized in a navigation graph.