Maven 2 support in Seam has been a topic that has been requested, debated, and discussed for a long time. The simple truth is that it's possible today to create a Seam application that is powered by a Maven 2 build. That's because the Seam project publishes its artifacts in the JBoss Maven 2 repository. You can find information in the Seam reference documentation about how to refer to these artifacts.

And the community has answered. See this FAQ for a list of Maven 2 archetypes, including one sanctioned by the Seam development team!

Still, the problem remains that you have no official help from the Seam project to set up this scaffolding. That's what the following three issues are about:

JBSEAM-2371 - Integration testing Seam components with Maven
JBSEAM-2283 - Mavenize seam-gen's library usage
JBSEAM-3738 - Maven example for Seam
JBSEAM-2026 - Maven archetypes

The long term goal of the Seam project is to provide the developer with a seed to help grow a Seam application based on a Maven 2 build. There are really two needs:

To be able to generate a Maven 2 Seam application
To be able to build the Seam project with Maven 2

Most people won't care about #2 and frankly they can be done independently of #1. The key part of #1 is having a Maven 2 example under the examples directory. In my mind, that is the first step. It will serve as the prototype for what seam-gen will create. We would also like to provide a Maven 2 archetype that people can use perhaps as an alternative to seam-gen (or seam-gen can simply generate a Maven 2 project using this archetype).

To help evaluate what this seed will look like, a collection of Mavenized Seam project templates have been assembled in the following FAQ entry. The Seam team also recommends the sanctioned initiative in that document.

Is there a Maven 2 project template for Seam applications?

Using Maven with SeamTest

See Configuring JPA for your Test Environment

Created: 10. Jan 2008, 14:26 America/New_York (Pete Muir)

Last Modified: 22. Sep 2011, 03:25 America/New_York (Shane Bryzak)

7 comments:

08. Mar 2009, 14:53 America/New_York | Link

Siarhei

To be honest, I think that integration testing with maven (and so that it would work with eclipse+boss tools) is the biggest issue at the moment: JBSEAM-2371.

19. Mar 2009, 11:16 America/New_York | Link

Gino Miceli

I absolutely agree. If I can't get this working I am considering changing tool stacks.

27. Mar 2009, 13:31 America/New_York | Link

J. Hernandez

Gino Miceli wrote on Mar 19, 2009 11:16:
I absolutely agree. If I can't get this working I am considering changing tool stacks.

I agree as well, it's a total showstopper at my company.

01. Apr 2009, 18:45 America/New_York | Link

Arbi Sookazian

Is there any update on these JIRA's? I looked at the JIRA logs and it looks like all four are not assigned or completed yet.

Are these going to be targeted for Seam 3.x?

When can we officially begin using Maven integration with seam-gen?

required reading: Scala and more Scala... www.artima.com

07. Apr 2009, 01:59 America/New_York | Link

DB.

I like seam and use it every day .. my company is about 19000 person and i now have big doubts about considering to advice our clients to take seam to make their application because of the setup shortage to create applications with maven and be able to test them with maven (I think about continous integration).

In todays world, i could never have thought of creating such a framework without maven support ..

Also there is another problem with seam which is that hot deployment is crap because you have to use jboss tools and make a touch (same as linux touch on files) on your project in order to redeploy it where on other platforms it just takes to save the class file you just changed .. this is really counterproductive ..

16. Jul 2009, 19:11 America/New_York | Link

Geisly

I agree as well.

I'm using Seam in a project with Maven 2 and Eclipse.

The amount of time I've spent trying to make integration tests work (with JMS and persistence), trying to adjust dependencies... really makes me reconsider the choice of using Seam as the framework to develop a real application.

I cannot use SeamGen and Ant is too painful for bigger projects.

10. Sep 2009, 23:57 America/New_York | Link

Dan Allen

Keep in mind that Seam was created before Maven 2 really become popular or had wide-spread usage. Seam 3 is the first chance we have had to make a clean break and design a project build that can be more accommodating of modular build tools like Maven 2. And it's going to be really clean.

Dan Allen | mojavelinux.com | Author of Seam in Action