How Popular is the Seam Framework

Question

I'm using JBoss Seam Framework, but it's seems to me isn't very popular among java developers. I want to know how many java programmers here are using it, and in what kind of projects. Is as good as django, or RoR?

Answer 1

Hope this helps a little, but at my college our web applications course just got revamped. So now we are going the jsp, servlet, hibernate route with the second part of the course on mostly JBoss Seam. So who knows, it probably just needs time to grow in the community.

Answer 2

In our JBoss Seam in Action presentation at the Javapolis conference last year, my colleague and I said that 'Seam is the next Struts'. This needed some explanation, which I later wrote-up as Seam is the new Struts. Needless to say, we like Seam.

One indication of Seam's popularity is the level of traffic on the Seam Users Forum.

Answer 3

Seam is fixed JSF based on annotations. No more crappy XML. I used it at work.

Answer 4

I have used JBoss Seam on two commercial projects for two different clients. Yet JBoss Seam is still a new approach to developing JSF Web Applications. One measure is the results from a Indeed Job Search.

Indeed Job Search

Answer 5

I would say that seam is a rather popular framework, it has great documentation, a great and helpful community and a forum with many many questions and problems answered.

It should be popular among developers who use jsf beacuse it works great with jsf, but not only that... it fixes jsf in many ways (s:convertEntity tag, and unified component model are my favourite examples).

Answer 6

It really works for us....JSF+EJB3.0 with the help of seam framework is really fantastic.But i have a question...why this is not becoming more popular for developing large scale application.I have seen that many are using other frameworks for developing large scale j2ee application.It seems to me that seam really helps the developers to build a j2ee application...but still ...why this but coming in?

Answer 7

I have used JBoss Seam now for about a year and like it very much over Spring. Unfortunately, I don't use this at work, more for side projects and personal projects. For me, it saves me a lot of time developing new projects for clients. And, one big reason I use it primarily is, the tight integration with each layer and I never get any lazy load errors that I used to get with Spring (even after the filter and other hacks).

An equivalent Spring application would have much more boilerplate code within it to get stuff working. Spring does not integrate each layer very well, it more or less is a wrapper for a lot of different things, but doesn't glue itself together very well.

The other nice thing I like with Seam is they practice what they preach. Take a look at their website. Take a guess what it is running, hmm, a live example of their code. Seam Wiki, Seam Forums, etc. If you truly believe in your code, stand behind it. I would be happy to have their pager 24x7x365, I bet it rarely goes off.

While you write a lot less code, the learning curve is about twice as steep. The further I get in, the more I understand how to write good code. I would like to see more comments, but as far as coding style, it is well written.

On the negative side, just as any product you try to market, Seam was years after Spring had already become popular so Spring is by far still more popular. Search on Indeed and Seam only has a few hits. If you look on Spring, there are roughly 40k registered users, while Seam has about 7k.

Depends on what is important to you, as a Java developer/engineer/programmer, you should be able to work with both technologies and chances are, you will most likely encounter a Spring application before a Seam one. Learn both and how to leverage both. If you use both properly and know the nuances and quirks of each, development becomes much easier whether you're using Spring or Seam.

I don't agree with the statement, "Seam is the next Struts". Struts was a view technology whereas Seam integrates all layers. I will agree that it is a new concept like Struts and will bring the same impact to the Java community that Struts did. I don't think we'll see that until Java EE 6 and CDI become more popular, and of course Seam 3 is released.

Walter

Answer 8

You can also see in the Seam in Production pages to see which sites/organizations uses Seam.

Seam in Production page 1

Seam in Production page 2

Answer 9

I like Seam, have been using it for the past year professionally.

However, the question concerns its popularity. I can see the following indications that it is not very popular (at least in comparison to plain JSF or Spring):

1. Its forum is very inactive (at least at this point, they are working hard on Seam 3). http://seamframework.org/Community/SeamCommunityForumSlightlyInactive

2. You can also take a look at its comparison with Spring in Google insights for search: http://www.google.com/insights/search/?hl=en-US#cat=732&q=seam%2Cspring&cmpt=q

3. I only know one other company here in Athens where they use it, and I know a handful of companies that use plain JSF, Struts or Spring (of course, Athens is not representative for all the world).

Answer 10

We have been using Seam for a while in huge projects. Easy to kick-off a new project, reverse engineering is very handy.

Answer 11

When Java was introduced in the 90s as oak the community did not embrace it because it was too powerful for its time and was appreciated later on and is now running the show. Seam will get popular soon. if not it can be rebranded just as oak to java.