Seam - Contextual Components

First, make sure you have Ant correctly installed, with $ANT_HOME and $JAVA_HOME set correctly. Next, make sure you set the location of your JBoss AS 4.0.4 installation in the build.properties file in the root folder of your Seam installation. If you haven't already done so, start JBoss AS now by typing bin/run.sh or bin/run.bat in the root directory of your JBoss installation.

Now, build and deploy the example by typing ant deploy in the examples/registration directory.

Try it out by accessing http://localhost:8080/seam-registration/ with your web browser.

First, make sure you have Ant correctly installed, with $ANT_HOME and $JAVA_HOME set correctly. Next, make sure you set the location of your Tomcat 5.5 installation in the build.properties file in the root folder of your Seam installation.

Now, build and deploy the example by typing ant deploy.tomcat in the examples/registration directory.

Finally, start Tomcat.

Try it out by accessing http://localhost:8080/jboss-seam-registration/ with your web browser.

When you deploy the example to Tomcat, any EJB3 components will run inside the JBoss Embeddable EJB3 container, a complete standalone EJB3 container environment.

Most of the examples come with a suite of TestNG integration tests. The easiest way to run the tests is to run ant testexample inside the examples/registration directory. It is also possible to run the tests inside your IDE using the TestNG plugin.

The example is implemented with two JSP pages, one entity bean and one stateless session bean.

Let's take a look at the code, starting from the "bottom".

@Entity                                                                                  (1)
@Name("user")                                                                            (2)
@Scope(SESSION)                                                                          (3)
@Table(name="users")                                                                     (4)
public class User implements Serializable
{
   private static final long serialVersionUID = 1881413500711441951L;
   
   private String username;                                                              (5)
   private String password;
   private String name;
   
   public User(String name, String password, String username)
   {
      this.name = name;
      this.password = password;
      this.username = username;
   }
   
   public User() {}                                                                      (6)
   
   @NotNull @Length(min=5, max=15)                                                       (7)
   public String getPassword()
   {
      return password;
   }

   public void setPassword(String password)
   {
      this.password = password;
   }
   
   @NotNull
   public String getName()
   {
      return name;
   }

   public void setName(String name)
   {
      this.name = name;
   }
   
   @Id @NotNull @Length(min=5, max=15)                                                   (8)
   public String getUsername()
   {
      return username;
   }

   public void setUsername(String username)
   {
      this.username = username;
   }

}

@Stateless                                                                               (1)
@Name("register")
public class RegisterAction implements Register
{

   @In                                                                                   (2)
   private User user;
   
   @PersistenceContext                                                                   (3)
   private EntityManager em;
   
   @Logger                                                                               (4)
   private Log log;
   
   public String register()                                                              (5)
   {
      List existing = em.createQuery("select username from User where username=:username")
         .setParameter("username", user.getUsername())
         .getResultList();
         
      if (existing.size()==0)
      {
         em.persist(user);
         log.info("Registered new user #{user.username}");                               (6)
         return "/registered.jsp";                                                       (7)
      }
      else
      {
         FacesMessages.instance().add("User #{user.username} already exists");           (8)
         return null;
      }
   }

}

@Local
public interface Register
{
   public String register();
}

<components>

    <component name="org.jboss.seam.core.init">
        <!-- JNDI name pattern for JBoss EJB 3.0 -->
        <property name="jndiPattern">#{ejbName}/local</property>
    </component>

</components>

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app version="2.4"
    xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee
                        http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee/web-app_2_4.xsd">


    <!-- Seam -->

    <listener>
        <listener-class>org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamListener</listener-class>
    </listener>

    <!-- MyFaces -->

    <listener>
        <listener-class>
            org.apache.myfaces.webapp.StartupServletContextListener
        </listener-class>
    </listener>

    <context-param>
        <param-name>javax.faces.STATE_SAVING_METHOD</param-name>
        <param-value>client</param-value>
    </context-param>

    <servlet>
        <servlet-name>Faces Servlet</servlet-name>
        <servlet-class>javax.faces.webapp.FacesServlet</servlet-class>
        <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
    </servlet>

    <!-- Faces Servlet Mapping -->
    <servlet-mapping>
        <servlet-name>Faces Servlet</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>*.seam</url-pattern>
    </servlet-mapping>

</web-app>

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE faces-config 
PUBLIC "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD JavaServer Faces Config 1.0//EN"
                            "http://java.sun.com/dtd/web-facesconfig_1_0.dtd">
<faces-config>

    <!-- A phase listener is needed by all Seam applications -->
    
    <lifecycle>
        <phase-listener>org.jboss.seam.jsf.SeamPhaseListener</phase-listener>
    </lifecycle>

</faces-config>

<ejb-jar>
   <assembly-descriptor>
      <interceptor-binding>
         <ejb-name>*</ejb-name>
         <interceptor-class>org.jboss.seam.ejb.SeamInterceptor</interceptor-class>
      </interceptor-binding>
   </assembly-descriptor>
</ejb-jar>

<persistence>
    <persistence-unit name="userDatabase">
      <provider>org.hibernate.ejb.HibernatePersistence</provider>
      <jta-data-source>java:/DefaultDS</jta-data-source>
      <properties>
         <property name="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto" value="create-drop"/>
      </properties>
    </persistence-unit>
</persistence>

<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html" prefix="h" %>
<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core" prefix="f" %>
<%@ taglib uri="http://jboss.com/products/seam/taglib" prefix="s" %>
<html>
 <head>
  <title>Register New User</title>
 </head>
 <body>
  <f:view>
   <h:form>
     <table border="0">
       <s:validateAll>
         <tr>
           <td>Username</td>
           <td><h:inputText value="#{user.username}"/></td>
         </tr>
         <tr>
           <td>Real Name</td>
           <td><h:inputText value="#{user.name}"/></td>
         </tr>
         <tr>
           <td>Password</td>
           <td><h:inputSecret value="#{user.password}"/></td>
         </tr>
       </s:validateAll>
     </table>
     <h:messages/>
     <h:commandButton type="submit" value="Register" action="#{register.register}"/>
   </h:form>
  </f:view>
 </body>
</html>

<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html" prefix="h" %>
<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core" prefix="f" %>
<html>
 <head>
  <title>Successfully Registered New User</title>
 </head>
 <body>
  <f:view>
    Welcome, <h:outputText value="#{user.name}"/>, 
    you are successfully registered as <h:outputText value="#{user.username}"/>.
  </f:view>
 </body>
</html>

<application>
    <display-name>Seam</display-name>

    <module>
        <web>
            <web-uri>jboss-seam-registration.war</web-uri>
            <context-root>/seam-registration</context-root>
        </web>
    </module>
    <module>
        <ejb>jboss-seam-registration.jar</ejb>
    </module>
    <module>
        <java>jboss-seam.jar</java>
    </module>
    
</application>

We've now seen all the files in the entire application!

When the form is submitted, JSF asks Seam to resolve the variable named user. Since there is no value already bound to that name (in any Seam context), Seam instantiates the user component, and returns the resulting User entity bean instance to JSF after storing it in the Seam session context.

The form input values are now validated against the Hibernate Validator constraints specified on the User entity. If the constraints are violated, JSF redisplays the page. Otherwise, JSF binds the form input values to properties of the User entity bean.

Next, JSF asks Seam to resolve the variable named register. Seam finds the RegisterAction stateless session bean in the stateless context and returns it. JSF invokes the register() action listener method.

Seam intercepts the method call and injects the User entity from the Seam session context, before continuing the invocation.

The register() method checks if a user with the entered username already exists. If so, an error message is queued with the FacesMessages component, and a null outcome is returned, causing a page redisplay. The FacesMessages component interpolates the JSF expression embedded in the message string and adds a JSF FacesMessage to the view.

If no user with that username exists, the "/registered.jsp" outcome triggers a browser redirect to the registered.jsp page. When JSF comes to render the page, it asks Seam to resolve the variable named user and uses property values of the returned User entity from Seam's session scope.

The message list example has one entity bean, Message, one session bean, MessageListBean and one JSP.

@Entity
@Name("message")
@Scope(EVENT)
public class Message implements Serializable
{
   private Long id;
   private String title;
   private String text;
   private boolean read;
   private Date datetime;
   
   @Id @GeneratedValue
   public Long getId() {
      return id;
   }
   public void setId(Long id) {
      this.id = id;
   }
   
   @NotNull @Length(max=100)
   public String getTitle() {
      return title;
   }
   public void setTitle(String title) {
      this.title = title;
   }
   
   @NotNull @Lob
   public String getText() {
      return text;
   }
   public void setText(String text) {
      this.text = text;
   }
   
   @NotNull
   public boolean isRead() {
      return read;
   }
   public void setRead(boolean read) {
      this.read = read;
   }
   
   @NotNull 
   @Basic @Temporal(TemporalType.TIMESTAMP)
   public Date getDatetime() {
      return datetime;
   }
   public void setDatetime(Date datetime) {
      this.datetime = datetime;
   }
   
}

@Stateful
@Scope(SESSION)
@Name("messageManager")
public class MessageManagerBean implements Serializable, MessageManager
{

   @DataModel                                                                            (1)
   private List<Message> messageList;
   
   @DataModelSelection                                                                   (2)
   @Out(required=false)                                                                  (3)
   private Message message;
   
   @PersistenceContext(type=EXTENDED)                                                    (4)
   private EntityManager em;
   
   @Factory("messageList")                                                               (5)
   public void findMessages()
   {
      messageList = em.createQuery("from Message msg order by msg.datetime desc").getResultList();
   }
   
   public void select()                                                                  (6)
   {
      message.setRead(true);
   }
   
   public void delete()                                                                  (7)
   {
      messageList.remove(message);
      em.remove(message);
      message=null;
   }
   
   @Remove @Destory                                                                      (8)
   public void destroy() {}

}

@Local
public interface MessageManager
{
   public void findMessages();
   public void select();
   public void delete();
   public void destroy();
}

<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html" prefix="h" %>
<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core" prefix="f" %>
<html>
 <head>
  <title>Messages</title>
 </head>
 <body>
  <f:view>
   <h:form>
     <h2>Message List</h2>
     <h:outputText value="No messages to display" rendered="#{messageList.rowCount==0}"/>
     <h:dataTable var="msg" value="#{messageList}" rendered="#{messageList.rowCount>0}">
        <h:column>
           <f:facet name="header">
              <h:outputText value="Read"/>
           </f:facet>
           <h:selectBooleanCheckbox value="#{msg.read}" disabled="true"/>
        </h:column>
        <h:column>
           <f:facet name="header">
              <h:outputText value="Title"/>
           </f:facet>
           <h:commandLink value="#{msg.title}" action="#{messageManager.select}"/>
        </h:column>
        <h:column>
           <f:facet name="header">
              <h:outputText value="Date/Time"/>
           </f:facet>
           <h:outputText value="#{msg.datetime}">
              <f:convertDateTime type="both" dateStyle="medium" timeStyle="short"/>
           </h:outputText>
        </h:column>
        <h:column>
           <h:commandButton value="Delete" action="#{messageManager.delete}"/>
        </h:column>
     </h:dataTable>
     <h3><h:outputText value="#{message.title}"/></h3>
     <div><h:outputText value="#{message.text}"/></div>
   </h:form>
  </f:view>
 </body>
</html>

The first time we navigate to the messages.jsp page, whether by a JSF postback (faces request) or a direct browser GET request (non-faces request), the page will try to resolve the messageList context variable. Since this context variable is not initialized, Seam will call the factory method findMessages(), which performs a query against the database and results in a DataModel being outjected. This DataModel provides the row data needed for rendering the <h:dataTable>.

When the user clicks the <h:commandLink>, JSF calls the select() action listener. Seam intercepts this call and injects the selected row data into the message attribute of the messageManager component. The action listener fires, marking the selected Message as read. At the end of the call, Seam outjects the selected Message to the context variable named message. Next, the EJB container commits the transaction, and the change to the Message is flushed to the database. Finally, the page is re-rendered, redisplaying the message list, and displaying the selected message below it.

If the user clicks the <h:commandButton>, JSF calls the delete() action listener. Seam intercepts this call and injects the selected row data into the message attribute of the messageList component. The action listener fires, removing the selected Message from the list, and also calling remove() on the EntityManager. At the end of the call, Seam refreshes the messageList context variable and clears the context variable named message. The EJB container commits the transaction, and deletes the Message from the database. Finally, the page is re-rendered, redisplaying the message list.

The center of this example is the jBPM process definition. There are also two JSPs and two trivial JavaBeans (There was no reason to use session beans, since they do not access the database, or have any other transactional behavior). Let's start with the process definition:

<process-definition name="todo">
   
   <start-state name="start">                                                            (1)
      <transition to="todo"/>
   </start-state>
   
   <task-node name="todo">                                                               (2)
      <task name="todo" description="#{todoList.description}">                           (3)
         <assignment actor-id="#{actor.id}"/>                                            (4)
      </task>
      <transition to="done"/>
   </task-node>
   
   <end-state name="done"/>                                                              (5)
   
</process-definition>

If we view this process definition using the process definition editor provided by JBossIDE, this is what it looks like:

This document defines our business process as a graph of nodes. This is the most trivial possible business process: there is one task to be performed, and when that task is complete, the business process ends.

The first JavaBean handles the login screen login.jsp. Its job is just to initialize the jBPM actor id using the actor component. (In a real application, it would also need to authenticate the user.)

@Name("login")
public class Login {
   
   @In(create=true) 
   private Actor actor;
   
   private String user;

   public String getUser() {
      return user;
   }

   public void setUser(String user) {
      this.user = user;
   }
   
   public String login()
   {
      actor.setId(user);
      return "/todo.jsp";
   }
}

Here we see the use of @In(create=true), which tells Seam to create an instance of a component, in this case the component named actor, if none currently exists in the context.

The JSP itself is trivial:

<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html" prefix="h"%>
<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core" prefix="f"%>
<html>
<head>
<title>Login</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Login</h1>
<f:view>
    <h:form>
      <div>
        <h:inputText value="#{login.user}"/>
        <h:commandButton value="Login" action="#{login.login}"/>
      </div>
    </h:form>
</f:view>
</body>
</html>

The second JavaBean is responsible for starting business process instances, and ending tasks.

@Name("todoList")
public class TodoList {
   
   private String description;
   
   public String getDescription()                                                        (1)
   {
      return description;
   }

   public void setDescription(String description) {
      this.description = description;
   }
   
   @CreateProcess(definition="todo")                                                     (2)
   public void createTodo() {}
   
   @StartTask @EndTask                                                                   (3)
   public void done() {}

}

In a more realistic example, @StartTask and @EndTask would not appear on the same method, because there is usually work to be done using the application in order to complete the task.

Finally, the meat of the application is in todo.jsp:

<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html" prefix="h" %>
<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core" prefix="f" %>
<%@ taglib uri="http://jboss.com/products/seam/taglib" prefix="s" %>
<html>
<head>
<title>Todo List</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Todo List</h1>
<f:view>
   <h:form id="list">
      <div>
         <h:outputText value="There are no todo items." rendered="#{empty taskInstanceList}"/>
         <h:dataTable value="#{taskInstanceList}" var="task" rendered="#{not empty taskInstanceList}">
            <h:column>
                <f:facet name="header">
                    <h:outputText value="Description"/>
                </f:facet>
                <h:inputText value="#{task.description}"/>
            </h:column>
            <h:column>
                <f:facet name="header">
                    <h:outputText value="Created"/>
                </f:facet>
                <h:outputText value="#{task.taskMgmtInstance.processInstance.start}">
                    <f:convertDateTime type="date"/>
                </h:outputText>
            </h:column>
            <h:column>
                <f:facet name="header">
                    <h:outputText value="Priority"/>
                </f:facet>
                <h:inputText value="#{task.priority}" style="width: 30"/>
            </h:column>
            <h:column>
                <f:facet name="header">
                    <h:outputText value="Due Date"/>
                </f:facet>
                <h:inputText value="#{task.dueDate}" style="width: 100">
                    <f:convertDateTime type="date" dateStyle="short"/>
                </h:inputText>
            </h:column>
            <h:column>
                <s:link value="Done" action="#{todoList.done}" taskInstance="#{task}" linkStyle="button"/>
            </h:column>
         </h:dataTable>
      </div>
      <div>
      <h:messages/>
      </div>
      <div>
         <h:commandButton value="Update Items" action="update"/>
      </div>
   </h:form>
   <h:form id="new">
      <div>
         <h:inputText value="#{todoList.description}"/>
         <h:commandButton value="Create New Item" action="#{todoList.createTodo}"/>
      </div>
   </h:form>
</f:view>
</body>
</html>

Let's take this one piece at a time.

The page renders a list of tasks, which it gets from a built-in Seam component named taskInstanceList. The list is defined inside a JSF form.

<h:form id="list">
   <div>
      <h:outputText value="There are no todo items." rendered="#{empty taskInstanceList}"/>
      <h:dataTable value="#{taskInstanceList}" var="task" rendered="#{not empty taskInstanceList}">
         ...
      </h:dataTable>
   </div>
</h:form>

Each element of the list is an instance of the jBPM class TaskInstance. The following code simply displays the interesting properties of each task in the list. For the description, priority and due date, we use input controls, to allow the user to update these values.

<h:column>
    <f:facet name="header">
       <h:outputText value="Description"/>
    </f:facet>
    <h:inputText value="#{task.description}"/>
</h:column>
<h:column>
    <f:facet name="header">
        <h:outputText value="Created"/>
    </f:facet>
    <h:outputText value="#{task.taskMgmtInstance.processInstance.start}">
        <f:convertDateTime type="date"/>
    </h:outputText>
</h:column>
<h:column>
    <f:facet name="header">
        <h:outputText value="Priority"/>
    </f:facet>
    <h:inputText value="#{task.priority}" style="width: 30"/>
</h:column>
<h:column>
    <f:facet name="header">
        <h:outputText value="Due Date"/>
    </f:facet>
    <h:inputText value="#{task.dueDate}" style="width: 100">
        <f:convertDateTime type="date" dateStyle="short"/>
    </h:inputText>
</h:column>

This button ends the task by calling the action method annotated @StartTask @EndTask. It passes the task id to Seam as a request parameter:

<h:column>
    <s:link value="Done" action="#{todoList.done}" taskInstance="#{task}" linkStyle="button"/>
</h:column>

(Note that this is using a Seam <s:link> JSF control from the seam-ui.jar package.)

This button is used to update the properties of the tasks. When the form is submitted, Seam and jBPM will make any changes to the tasks persistent. There is no need for any action listener method:

<h:commandButton value="Update Items" action="update"/>

A second form on the page is used to create new items, by calling the action method annotated @CreateProcess.

<h:form id="new">
    <div>
        <h:inputText value="#{todoList.description}"/>
        <h:commandButton value="Create New Item" action="#{todoList.createTodo}"/>
    </div>
</h:form>

There are several other files needed for the example, but they are just standard jBPM and Seam configuration and not very interesting.

TODO

The example is implemented using one JavaBean, three JSP pages and a jPDL pageflow definition. Let's begin with the pageflow:

<pageflow-definition name="numberGuess">
   
   <start-page name="displayGuess" view-id="/numberGuess.jsp">
      <redirect/>
      <transition name="guess" to="evaluateGuess">
          <action expression="#{numberGuess.guess}" />
      </transition>                                                                      (1)
   </start-page>                                                                         (2)
                                                                                         (3)
   <decision name="evaluateGuess" expression="#{numberGuess.correctGuess}">
      <transition name="true" to="win"/>
      <transition name="false" to="evaluateRemainingGuesses"/>
   </decision>                                                                           (4)
   
   <decision name="evaluateRemainingGuesses" expression="#{numberGuess.lastGuess}">
      <transition name="true" to="lose"/>
      <transition name="false" to="displayGuess"/>
   </decision>
   
   <page name="win" view-id="/win.jsp">
      <redirect/>
      <end-conversation />
   </page>
   
   <page name="lose" view-id="/lose.jsp">
      <redirect/>
      <end-conversation />
   </page>
   
</pageflow-definition>

Here is what the pageflow looks like in the JBossIDE pageflow editor:

Now that we have seen the pageflow, it is very, very easy to understand the rest of the application!

Here is the main page of the application, numberGuess.jsp:

<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html" prefix="h"%>
<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core" prefix="f"%>
<html>
<head>
<title>Guess a number...</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Guess a number...</h1>
<f:view>
    <h:form>
        <h:outputText value="Higher!" rendered="#{numberGuess.randomNumber>numberGuess.currentGuess}" />
        <h:outputText value="Lower!" rendered="#{numberGuess.randomNumber<numberGuess.currentGuess}" />
        <br />
        I'm thinking of a number between <h:outputText value="#{numberGuess.smallest}" /> and 
        <h:outputText value="#{numberGuess.biggest}" />. You have 
        <h:outputText value="#{numberGuess.remainingGuesses}" /> guesses.
        <br />
        Your guess: 
        <h:inputText value="#{numberGuess.currentGuess}" id="guess" required="true">
            <f:validateLongRange
                maximum="#{numberGuess.biggest}" 
                minimum="#{numberGuess.smallest}"/>
        </h:inputText>
        <h:commandButton type="submit" value="Guess" action="guess" />
        <br/>
        <h:message for="guess" style="color: red"/>
    </h:form>
</f:view>
</body>
</html>

Notice how the command button names the guess transition instead of calling an action directly.

The win.jsp page is predictable:

<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html" prefix="h"%>
<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core" prefix="f"%>
<html>
<head>
<title>You won!</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>You won!</h1>
<f:view>
    Yes, the answer was <h:outputText value="#{numberGuess.currentGuess}" />.
    It took you <h:outputText value="#{numberGuess.guessCount}" /> guesses.
    Would you like to <a href="numberGuess.seam">play again</a>?
  </f:view>
</body>
</html>

As is lose.jsp (which I can't be bothered copy/pasting). Finally, the JavaBean Seam component:

@Name("numberGuess")
@Scope(ScopeType.CONVERSATION)
public class NumberGuess {
   
   private int randomNumber;
   private Integer currentGuess;
   private int biggest;
   private int smallest;
   private int guessCount;
   private int maxGuesses;
   
   @Create                                                                               (1)
   @Begin(pageflow="numberGuess")                                                        (2)
   public void begin()
   {
      randomNumber = new Random().nextInt(100);
      guessCount = 0;
      biggest = 100;
      smallest = 1;
   }
   
   public void setCurrentGuess(Integer guess)
   {
      this.currentGuess = guess;
   }
   
   public Integer getCurrentGuess()
   {
      return currentGuess;
   }
   
   public void guess()
   {
      if (currentGuess>randomNumber)
      {
         biggest = currentGuess - 1;
      }
      if (currentGuess<randomNumber)
      {
         smallest = currentGuess + 1;
      }
      guessCount ++;
   }
   
   public boolean isCorrectGuess()
   {
      return currentGuess==randomNumber;
   }
   
   public int getBiggest()
   {
      return biggest;
   }
   
   public int getSmallest()
   {
      return smallest;
   }
   
   public int getGuessCount()
   {
      return guessCount;
   }
   
   public boolean isLastGuess()
   {
      return guessCount==maxGuesses;
   }

   public int getRemainingGuesses() {
      return maxGuesses-guessCount;
   }

   public void setMaxGuesses(int maxGuesses) {
      this.maxGuesses = maxGuesses;
   }

   public int getMaxGuesses() {
      return maxGuesses;
   }

   public int getRandomNumber() {
      return randomNumber;
   }
}

As you can see, this Seam component is pure business logic! It doesn't need to know anything at all about the user interaction flow. This makes the component potentially more reuseable.

TODO

The booking application is a complete hotel room reservation system incorporating the following features:

The booking application uses JSF, EJB 3.0 and Seam, together with Facelets for the view. There is also a port of this application to JSF, Facelets, Seam, JavaBeans and Hibernate3.

One of the things you'll notice if you play with this application for long enough is that it is extremely robust. You can play with back buttons and browser refresh and opening multiple windows and entering nonsensical data as much as you like and you will find it very difficult to make the application crash. You might think that we spent weeks testing and fixing bugs to achive this. Actually, this is not the case. Seam was designed to make it very straightforward to build robust web applications and a lot of robustness that you are probably used to having to code yourself comes naturally and automatically with Seam.

As you browse the sourcecode of the example application, and learn how the application works, observe how the declarative state management and integrated validation has been used to achieve this robustness.

The project structure is identical to the previous one, to install and deploy this application, please refer to Section 1.1, “Try the examples”. Once you've successfully started the application, you can access it by pointing your browser to http://localhost:8080/seam-booking/

Just ten classes (plus six session beans local interfaces and 1 annotation interface) where used to implement this application. Six session bean action listeners contain all the business logic for the listed features.

Three entity beans implement the application's persistent domain model.

Finally, the LoggedIn annotation and the LoggedInInterceptor are used to protect actions that require a logged in user.

We encourage you browse the sourcecode at your pleasure. In this tutorial we'll concentrate upon one particular piece of functionality: hotel search, selection, booking and confirmation. From the point of view of the user, everything from selecting a hotel to confirming a booking is one continuous unit of work, a conversation. Searching, however, is not part of the conversation. The user can select multiple hotels from the same search results page, in different browser tabs.

Most web application architectures have no first class construct to represent a conversation. This causes enormous problems managing state associated with the conversation. Usually, Java web applications use a combination of two techniques: first, some state is thrown into the HttpSession; second, persistable state is flushed to the database after every request, and reconstructed from the database at the beginning of each new request.

Since the database is the least scalable tier, this often results in an utterly unacceptable lack of scalability. Added latency is also a problem, due to the extra traffic to and from the database on every request. To reduce this redundant traffic, Java applications often introduce a data (second-level) cache that keeps commonly accessed data between requests. This cache is necessarily inefficient, because invalidation is based upon an LRU policy instead of being based upon when the user has finished working with the data. Furthermore, because the cache is shared between many concurrent transactions, we've introduced a whole raft of problem's associated with keeping the cached state consistent with the database.

Now consider the state held in the HttpSession. By very careful programming, we might be able to control the size of the session data. This is a lot more difficult than it sounds, since web browsers permit ad hoc non-linear navigation. But suppose we suddenly discover a system requirement that says that a user is allowed to have mutiple concurrent conversations, halfway through the development of the system (this has happened to me). Developing mechanisms to isolate session state associated with different concurrent conversations, and incorporating failsafes to ensure that conversation state is destroyed when the user aborts one of the conversations by closing a browser window or tab is not for the faint hearted (I've implemented this stuff twice so far, once for a client application, once for Seam, but I'm famously psychotic).

Now there is a better way.

Seam introduces the conversation context as a first class construct. You can safely keep conversational state in this context, and be assured that it will have a well-defined lifecycle. Even better, you won't need to be continually pushing data back and forth between the application server and the database, since the conversation context is a natural cache of data that the user is currently working with.

Usually, the components we keep in the conversation context are stateful session beans. (We can also keep entity beans and JavaBeans in the conversation context.) There is an ancient canard in the Java community that stateful session beans are a scalability killer. This may have been true in 1998 when WebFoobar 1.0 was released. It is no longer true today. Application servers like JBoss 4.0 have extremely sophisticated mechanisms for stateful session bean state replication. (For example, the JBoss EJB3 container performs fine-grained replication, replicating only those bean attribute values which actually changed.) Note that all the traditional technical arguments for why stateful beans are inefficient apply equally to the HttpSession, so the practice of shifting state from business tier stateful session bean components to the web session to try and improve performance is unbelievably misguided. It is certainly possible to write unscalable applications using stateful session beans, by using stateful beans incorrectly, or by using them for the wrong thing. But that doesn't mean you should never use them. Anyway, Seam guides you toward a safe usage model. Welcome to 2005.

OK, I'll stop ranting now, and get back to the tutorial.

The booking example application shows how stateful components with different scopes can collaborate together to achieve complex behaviors. The main page of the booking application allows the user to search for hotels. The search results are kept in the Seam session scope. When the user navigates to one of these hotels, a conversation begins, and a conversation scoped component calls back to the session scoped component to retrieve the selected hotel.

The search functionality is implemented using a session-scope stateful session bean, similar to the one we saw in the message list example above.

@Stateful                                                                                (1)
@Name("hotelSearch")
@Scope(ScopeType.SESSION)
@LoggedIn                                                                                (2)
public class HotelSearchingAction implements HotelSearching
{
   
   @PersistenceContext
   private EntityManager em;
   
   private String searchString;
   private int pageSize = 10;
   
   @DataModel                                                                            (3)
   private List<Hotel> hotels;
   @DataModelSelection                                                                   (4)
   private Hotel selectedHotel;
   
   public String find()
   {
      String searchPattern = searchString==null ? "%" : '%' + searchString.toLowerCase().replace('*', '%') + '%';
      hotels = em.createQuery("from Hotel where lower(name) like :search or lower(city) like :search or lower(zip) like :search or lower(address) like :search")
            .setParameter("search", searchPattern)
            .setMaxResults(pageSize)
            .getResultList();
      
      return "main";
   }
   
   public Hotel getSelectedHotel()
   {
      return selectedHotel;
   }
      
   public int getPageSize() {
      return pageSize;
   }

   public void setPageSize(int pageSize) {
      this.pageSize = pageSize;
   }

   public String getSearchString()
   {
      return searchString;
   }

   public void setSearchString(String searchString)
   {
      this.searchString = searchString;
   }
   
   @Destroy @Remove                                                                      (5)
   public void destroy() {}

}