Conversations and pageflows in JSF
This session presents the approach to conversations and pageflows taken by each of JBoss Seam, Spring Web Flow, and Apache Orchestra frameworks. It addresses the pros and cons of each option with the primary focus being on how well they fit with JSF.
Not to long ago, the web came out of its shell and become social. I'm not talking about social networking sites, but rather communication between individual page views. JBoss Seam, Spring Web Flow, and Apache Orchestra all introduce a conversation context whose purpose is to maintain state that pertains to a use case across a series of pages.
Conversations help ween developers off of the HTTP session, being a far more attractive option because their life cycles can be managed independently from one another. They also last on the order of minutes rather than hours, reducing load on the memory footprint on the server. In addition to a long-running context, conversations can be combined with pageflows offered by each framework, which constrain a user's navigation path to predefined sequence. As such, pageflows can help reduce the complexity of navigation in an application.
About Dan Allen
Dan Allen is a member of the Seam and Web Beans project teams at JBoss by Red Hat, author of Seam in Action and a frequent speaker at major industry conferences such as JavaOne, Devoxx, TSSJS, Jazoon and JSFOne. Dan is known for his passionate work, with nearly a decade of development experience using technologies that include Java frameworks (Seam, JSF, EJB3, Hibernate, Spring, Struts), testing frameworks (JUnit, TestNG), JavaScript and DOM scripting, CSS and page layouts, Maven 2, Ant, Groovy, and many others.
Quickly after graduating from college, Dan became captivated by the world of free and open source software (FOSS). His involvment in FOSS helped him transition into the software development industry. He soon discovered the combination of Linux and the Java EE platform to be the ideal blend on which to build his professional career. In his search for a robust Web framework, Dan discovered JBoss Seam, which was quickly granted this most coveted spot in his development toolbox. The rest, as they say, is history. Dan is also a dedicated open source and Linux advocate and blogs about his experiences regularly. You can keep up with his discoveries by subscribing to his blog at http://mojavelinux.com.
