JSF Skill Required for Mastering Seam

[Hendy Setyo Mulyo]

Hi,

Someone said that to master Seam Framework I need to master JSF at first place. Is that true? I mean how deep the knowledge of JSF that I need to learn?
Thanks.

[Hussein Baghdadi]

JSF is used as the presentation framework for Seam applications.
The word "mastering" seems so powerful to me, I'm familiar to JSF to a good degree and I'm so productive with Seam.
Yes, you need to be "JSF master" if you are going to build an application with only JSF as the current versions -1.1, 1.2- contain many problems.
Seam remedies those issues, you don't to be master IMHO
I think familiarity to a good degree should be enough to me.
Even if you don't know JSF at all, you can build your UI with GWT and recently with Wicket (I think).

[Dan Allen]

Experience with JSF has been one of the big hurdles to Seam's adoption (mostly a mental hurdle). Since Seam is an integration framework, and not a web framework, there is inherently a need for you to know some other web framework, whether it be JSF (the preferred choice), Wicket, GWT, etc. Gavin choose JSF not only because it is extensible, but because it is the component-oriented framework has the best chance of being known by developers (being a standard part of Java EE).

But let's get to the real question, do you need to master it. Master is a strong word and JSF isn't that complicated. My answer is: No. In fact, JSF was designed to be as straightforward as possible for new developers (except that it ended up with lots of sore spots, which Seam fixes).

In the introduction of the book, I give a crash course in JSF. It's sort of like the intro you get on the first day of the job on how the company's software works. You are not an expert at the end, but you can at least start getting work done (and know enough to tell friends and family what you do). You will pick up the rest as you go.

[Dan Allen]

I also provide you with a bunch of resource to go read if the intro isn't enough. I honestly believe that if you read Rick Hightower's series on IBM developerWorks, you will know enough about JSF to succeed. And seam-gen makes it so simple for you to get a Seam project working, that you can put the two together and start experimenting on day one.

JSF for Nonbelievers Series
[ August 06, 2008: Message edited by: Dan Allen ]

[Daniel Hinojosa]

Don't go too far into learning JSF just to learn seam. My take is this...

1. Know and understand the JSF lifecycle, which looks daunting at first, but actually makes a whole lot of sense.
2. Know the basic tags <h:inputText>, <h utputText>, <h ataTable>, etc.
3. Know what a converter is.
4. Know what a renderer is.
5. Know what a validator is
5. Know what actions and actionListeners are.

and that is it. For 3,4,5 you just need an idea of what it is not necessarily how to create and implement them in JSF. Because in Seam, using Facelets, creating and implementing converters, validators and renderers are so easy it makes us jump for joy! Plain JSF had some promise but was very difficult to implement. With Seam, it makes JSF very easy and wonderful to work with. In fact, I try not to use the word JSF with Seam anymore since Seam is just that freaking awesome.