Traditional web applications are incredibly vulnerable to bugs and performance problems relating to state management. Developers are forced to handle issues like back button navigation, multiwindow browsing, and session size management in an utterly ad-hoc fashion. Web frameworks offer only extremely fragile state management constructs such as HttpSession and HttpRequest. Access to transactional components from the web tier has also been problematic. J2EE provided no way to have simultaneous access to state held in contexts associated with the web request, and state held in transactional resources accessed via EJB. Finally, J2EE had no first-class construct for representing state associated with a long-running business process.

JBoss Seam is a new application framework for Java EE 5 that introduces the notion of declarative, contextual, application state management. Seam integrates EJB 3.0 with JSF and, optionally, business process management via jBPM, providing a uniform component model for Java EE. This presentation will discuss problems affecting stateful web applications, introduce Seam’s declarative state management model, and demonstrate how easy it is to build robust web applications using EJB 3.0, JSF, and Seam.