Dan Allen
Senior Software Engineer - JBoss by Red Hat, Author, Open Source Advocate
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.
Blog
Don't overlook this framework
Posted Thursday, June 10, 2010
During my long flight to Frankfurt last month, I responded to an interview by Jan Groth about Seam for the German Java Magazin. In the interview, I reflect on the value of Open Source, how I got involved in Seam and where we are headed with Weld and Sea more »A concise and eloquent look at Seam
Posted Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Despite all that I have written, explained and presented about Seam, I often find myself struggling to sum it up in a few short breaths. Fortunately, Matt Campbell does an superb job of defining the essence of what Seam provides eloquently and concisely more »Why you didn't know the Unified EL is being updated
Posted Sunday, August 2, 2009
Information about the proposed Unified EL update slated for Java EE 6 is hard to come by, so I decided to put together a blog entry with some useful links. If you haven't heard yet, which is understandable given the lack of publicized information, the U more »A game-changing Maven 2 plugin you absolutely must use
Posted Monday, May 4, 2009
Ever since I first started using Maven 2, I envisioned having a console in which I could execute life-cycle goals without having to incur Maven's startup cost between every run. It just seemed to me such a waste for Maven to build up the project object m more »30 certainly was something
Posted Thursday, April 2, 2009
What a year! There's no question that year 30 was the most eventful and life changing year of my life to this point. I truly feel like I have grabbed life by the horns and got it steered in the direction I really want it to head more »Presentations
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. more »Building JSF components with the Ajax4jsf CDK
This talk introduces the Ajax4jsf CDK, demonstrating how to setup a new JSF component project, how to author the component using the CDK descriptors, and how to bundle the component for use in another application. The resource framework in Ajax4jsf is als more »Stacking the deck by integrating Spring beans and Seam
By attending this talk, developers can suppress their anxiety about the coexistence of the two frameworks, open their eyes to the potential that each boasts, and learn how to combine them to create a more powerful tool for their development toolbox. more »Conversations and pageflows in JSF
By Dan Allen
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.
Building JSF components with the Ajax4jsf CDK
By Dan Allen
This talk introduces the Ajax4jsf CDK, demonstrating how to setup a new JSF component project, how to author the component using the CDK descriptors, and how to bundle the component for use in another application. The resource framework in Ajax4jsf is also covered, which simplifies the task of serving JavaScript, CSS, and images necessary to support rich components.
For The pains of developing JSF components are fairly well documented. The extensible design of JSF components results in a plethora of required configuration files and classes which are reminiscent of EJB 2 artifacts (and no more fun to development and maintain). What's worse is that the rendered markup must be written in Java code, a step backwards towards Java servlets. Fortunately, the Ajax4jsf Component Development Kit (CDK) automates the task of creating the UI component and renderer classes from a single, descriptive XML configuration file and an accompanying JSP-style template. The Ajax4jsf CDK, a module of the RichFaces project, is a Maven 2-based development environment that takes away the monotonous coding and complexities of developing JSF components for both JSP and Facelets.
Stacking the deck by integrating Spring beans and Seam
By Dan Allen
By attending this talk, developers can suppress their anxiety about the coexistence of the two frameworks, open their eyes to the potential that each boasts, and learn how to combine them to create a more powerful tool for their development toolbox.
The Spring Framework and JBoss Seam are both lightweight inversion of control (IoC) and aspect-oriented (AOP) containers that champion the POJO programming model, though with slight variations. Each framework offers a dependency injection (DI) mechanism, ORM integration, declarative transactions, web service clients and endpoints, asynchronous messaging support, and other parallel integrations. The apparent overlap in the goals and features of these two frameworks has bred staunch competition amongst them, causing sparks to fly at times. This situation leaves the developer feeling conflicted as to which framework to employ and master. The choice, however, is not an exclusive one. In the dog eat dog world of today's technology market, the opportunity to create a federation between application frameworks is often overlooked. Spring and Seam share this symbiosis. POJO programming, which is endorsed by both frameworks, yields reusable objects that are not tied to infrastructure services and can thus be used in standalone environments. For Spring classes, that alternate environment can be a Seam application. This session will demonstrate how it is possible to take advantage of the vast, capable, and mature Spring APIs from within a Seam application, how Seam can leverage existing Spring components, and how Seam can contribute its capabilities back to the Spring container. Finally, this session will demonstrate how Spring and Seam can share resources, namely ORM persistence contexts and global transactions. This session hopes to raise awareness of the benefits of this union.
Books
by Dan Allen
Price: $29.69
You Save: $15.30 (34%)
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JBoss Seam is an exciting new application framework based on the Java EE platform that is used to build rich, web-based business applications. Seam is rapidly capturing the interest of Java enterprise developers because of its focus on simplicity, ease of use, transparent integration, and scalability.
Seam in Action offers a practical and in-depth look at JBoss Seam. The book puts Seam head-to-head with the complexities in the Java EE architecture. The author presents an unbiased view of Seam from outside the walls of RedHat/JBoss, focusing on such topics as Spring integration and deployment to alternative application servers to steer clear of vendor lock-in. By the end of the book, you should expect to not only gain a deep understanding of Seam, but also come away with the confidence to teach the material to others.
To start off, you will see a working Java EE-compliant application come together by the end of the second chapter. As you progress through the book, you will discover how Seam eliminates unnecessary layers and configurations, solves the most common JSF pain points, and establishes the missing link between JSF, EJB 3 and JavaBean components. The author also shows you how Seam opens doors for you to incorporate technologies you previously have not had time to learn, such as business processes and stateful page flows (jBPM), Ajax remoting, PDF generation, asynchronous tasks, and more.
All too often, developers spend a majority of their time integrating disparate technologies, manually tracking state, struggling to understand JSF, wrestling with Hibernate exceptions, and constantly redeploying applications, rather than on the logic pertaining to the business at hand. Seam in Action dives deep into thorough explanations of how Seam eliminates these non-core tasks by leveraging configuration by exception, Java 5 annotations, and aspect-oriented programming.
