As one of the many developers who spent a few years wrestling through the mess that was EJB2.0 I find it hard to spend any of my time researching and understanding EJB3.0. When I made the switch to architecting applications with the 'J2EE without EJB' approach (my beloved Spring + Hibernate) I never looked back.

With the release of Struts2 I was even more pleased with the architectures that I was developing in Java. Struts2 gave me a lot of flexibility with it's interceptor based request processing and the ability to create custom result types. This played really nicely into the RIA work I've been doing as of late in that my web tier actions could return Json results with little effort via a custom result type. In my mind Json is simply another view representation of the model. I really like MVC. In my experience event based web tier models never seemed to be the correct solution. Remote event handling just 'feels' weird. I have done .Net apps and Asp.net is ok. I just like the request/response model, or better yet, I've become accustomed to it.

In comes the Seam framework. Seam, for those not familiar, is the birth child of Gavin King of Hibernate fame. As far as innovation and vision goes Mr King seems to be on the cusp (although I still think Hibernate was strongly influenced by TopLink). Seam is pushing a completely different model than what the majority of us Java developers have gotten used to, one that is heavy on the standards, namely EJB and JSF. I followed EJB3 early on and I always felt that the goal of the group was to standardize the Spring + Hibernate model. Hell if i remember correctly Spring is the EJB container for WLS 10. But I digress.

So why am i mentioning all of this? Well it so happens that my ideas have been challenged once again. That's what I love about our industry, we get used to doing something one way and bam something else pops up that makes us reconsider our beliefs. I got into this field because I love innovation and now the Seam framework has once again sparked the curiosity within me that i haven't felt since I came across a framework called yui-ext (ExtJS now) over a year ago.

So expect some new content here dedicated to the integration of Seam and Ext.