I have to admit, I procrastinated over getting more familiar with Seam. Partially because I’ve had a bunch of other stuff on my plate, but mostly because of its close ties with EJB3. After giving EJB3 a fair shake, I realized it was actually ok. Over the Christmas break, I started looking into Seam more earnestly, and I must say that I’m very glad I did.

I haven’t tried Seam out in an actual application yet, but based on my reading and tinkering with it, I really like a few features:

- The conversational context stuff is particularly promising. I think it will save us a lot of headaches that arose from trying to manage application and workflow states in the session.

- Being able to use an extended persistence context as part of a conversation looks like it will get rid of a *ton* of problems we’ve been running into with JPA.

- Seam-gen looks to be really interesting for smaller projects. I don’t see us getting a lot of use out of it in some of the bigger and more complicated projects, but for smaller projects I do on the side, it promises to make JEE development almost as fast and pleasant as Ruby on Rails, but without some of the drawbacks.

With the latest release, it looks like you can use Seam outside of an EJB3 container - which is good news for those of us stuck on WebSphere for a while :) A 1.5 release is slated for the next month or so and will include a new security model.

It looks like Seam is going to be one of the most important and influential JEE projects in 2007.