Chapter 1. Introduction

1.1. What is Seam?

This introduction will help you to understand what is Seam.

Seam is a fully featured application framework on top of Java EE 5. It is also one of the most popular enterprise Java framework today. Seam deeply integrates many other standard-based or open source frameworks (e.g., JSF, EJB3, JMS, Web Services, jBPM, JBoss Rules, Ajax4jsf, RichFaces, Facelets, Spring, iText, Quartz, TestNG, etc.), and provides a single programming model for developers to "drive" those underlying frameworks via simple annotated POJOs (Plain Old Java Objects). It makes life easier for developers to tackle complex enterprise applications with many component frameworks.

1.2. Installation into Eclipse

Here, we are going to explain how to install Seam plugin into Eclipse.

The first thing you should do is to download Seam distribution and extract it in any folder. Then, simply put /plugins and /features folders from your distribution into the same ones of your eclipse directory. To ensure the eclipse have detected a new plugin run it with -clean option, i.e. eclipse -clean.

1.3. Other relevant resources on the topic

On JBoss you can find a set of benefits and other extra information on Seam Framework.