Thursday, May 01, 2008

EJB3 Seam GWT - part II, GWT 1.5m2

Short blog --
Working with Seam 2.1-SNAPSHOT and GWT 1.5M2 (with EJb3/jboss 4.2 backend).

To start off with a bang - JPA (hibernate) annotated beans are working!!! Yes, you can now use annotated entity beans as regular POJO's with Seam and GWT.

p.s. I really do *not* like the annotation approach and preferred the orm.xml deployment descriptor approach to keep the POJO truly clean and free from decoration with annotation behaviours -- but there are some problems with the hibernate orm.xml implementation that they 'lack resources' to correct, so whatever; use the actually supported annotation approach.

I unfortunately still not sure how to post code to blogger (need a full project, just sharing snippets is insufficient), but before you start jumping in too far here are the caveats:
  • Long and Date fields do not work as of 5/1/2008. GWT changed the behaviour of Longs in Milestone 2 of GWT 1.5, and the Seam guys haven't modified to support this yet -- it is, afterall, still a milestone release of GWT. http://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/JBSEAM-2935
  • Arrays do not work as of 5/1/2008. This confuses me - Seam 2.0.0.GA and GWT 1.4.60 arrays worked fine, not sure why this is now broken. http://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/JBSEAM-2933
  • Lists (genericized) now do work, and can be used as an alternative to the broken array implementation.
  • You can implement entitybean/pojo/DTO's that use the Long and Date fields, but when you RPC those fields you will get errors. You can test with your DTO and List as long as you do not actually use Long and Date fields (leave them blank/null).

Someone reminded me about something I've taken for granted - no, I am not using JNDI lookups. This is direct, session bean with Seam annotation exposed directly with the Seam-GWT remoting implementation to the GWT client. No middle JSF layer or JNDI layer or tomcat/servlet layer -- GWT web talking to EJB3/Seam server.

Still working on a more full example, have fun till then!