Chapter 2. Putting seam-gen to work

Learning a new framework can be challenging, risky, and time consuming. You must leave the comfort of your current tool set and venture into unknown territory. To justify your research, you seek out early victories in the form of trivial “Hello World” examples. After completing one, you celebrate your accomplishment. Sadly, few others will be so impressed.

Thanks to seam-gen, Seam’s rapid development tool, you can skip the putt-putt course and come out swinging on your first day with Seam. seam-gen creates for you a functional, database-oriented application that is ready for show and tell without requiring you to write a single line of code. The seam-gen tool first gathers information about your application, such as the project name and database connection properties. It then uses that information to put in place the scaffolding of a Seam-based project. Finally, you point seam-gen at your database, which it reverse-engineers to create artifacts that serve dynamic web pages used to create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) records in the database tables. The result? An achievement that’s sure to impress even the toughest crowd. How’s that for in Action?

2.1. The Open 18 prototype

2.2. Letting seam-gen do the initial work

2.3. Kick off your project with seam-gen

2.4. Deploying the project to JBoss AS

2.5. Show and tell, change, and repeat

2.6. Rapidly developing a seam-gen project

2.7. Summary