With the likes of AJAX coming to the fore in Java-based Web 2.0-oriented enterprise applications there is little surprise in companies like JBoss revamping development tools to match the changes. That’s OK then, for this is exactly what the company has done with the Seam application framework.

This upgrade, Version 1.1, unifies and integrates technologies such as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), JavaServer Faces (JSF), Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0 (EJB3), Java portlets, business process management (BPM) and workflow so that developers can assemble web applications with simple annotated POJOs (plain old Java objects), componentised UI widgets and simple XML.

There are several new features in Seam 1.1. For example, there is a new, alternative POJO component model to EJB3 which allows Seam to be used with containers like Hibernate or Apache Tomcat as well as J2EE application servers that do not support EJB3. A new tool for data-driven applications is claimed to make Seam as productive as any CRUD (create, read, update and delete) frameworks, while integration with JSF-based AJAX solutions such as ICEfaces and Ajax4jsf allows developers to build rich client applications requiring sophisticated client side GUI components.

Also included is support for the atomic conversation model available with Hibernate as the Java Persistence provider, and a new concurrency model and state-management model that copes with the way AJAX clients hit the server with many asynchronous, concurrent, fine-grained requests. ®