Strange Brew: The Blog of Warren Strange

For those of you interested in playing with JBoss SEAM on Glassfish, here are some tips which will hopefully get you going.

Disclaimer: I got this working, but I don‘t claim that my hacks are the right solution. There seem to be a few quirks/bugs in the booking demo that are problematic on Glassfish.

Before proceeding you will want to read Brian and Roger's blogs on the subject.

Here are the modifications that I made to the demo (note, no modifications to SEAM 1.0.1. are required):

Create a Netbeans enterprise project

You might want to use Brian‘s Netbeans project as a starting point, or alternatively (the route I chose) – create a Netbeans enterprise project and import the SEAM booking demo code into the project.

Update ejb-jar.xml

The ejb-jar from the example contained the binding declaration, but was missing the interceptor definition (I gather JBoss App Server does not require this). This is what my modified ejb-jar.xml looks like:

<ejb-jar>
<assembly-descriptor>
<interceptors>
<interceptor>
<interceptor-class>org.jboss.seam.ejb.SeamInterceptor</interceptor-class>
<!-- use other elements as per your requirement-->
</interceptor>
<!-- define other interceptors here-->
</interceptors>
<interceptor-binding>
<ejb-name>*</ejb-name>
<interceptor-class>org.jboss.seam.ejb.SeamInterceptor</interceptor-class>
</interceptor-binding>

</assembly-descriptor>
</ejb-jar>

Update web.xml

The web.xml setup is esentially as per the SEAM documentation with the caveat that Glassfish requires you to declare local ref‘s to your session beans (There is probably a good reason for this – but JBoss seems to get away without these declarations). Here is the modified web.xml (note that I named my project “reservit” and this is reflected in the ejb local ref‘s. You will need to update this to match your project deployment descriptor).

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app version="2.5" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd">

<!-- Seam -->
<listener>
<listener-class>org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamListener</listener-class>
</listener>

<!-- Propagate conversations across redirects -->
<filter>
<filter-name>Seam Redirect Filter</filter-name>
<filter-class>org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamRedirectFilter</filter-class>
</filter>

<filter-mapping>
<filter-name>Seam Redirect Filter</filter-name>
<url-pattern>*.seam</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>

<!-- JSF -->

<context-param>
<param-name>javax.faces.STATE_SAVING_METHOD</param-name>
<param-value>client</param-value>
</context-param>

<context-param>
<param-name>javax.faces.DEFAULT_SUFFIX</param-name>
<param-value>.xhtml</param-value>
</context-param>

<context-param>
<param-name>facelets.DEVELOPMENT</param-name>
<param-value>true</param-value>
</context-param>



<!-- Todo: this is already provided in the init code - not sure if it is needed
-->
<context-param>
<param-name>org.jboss.seam.core.init.jndiPattern</param-name>
<param-value>java:comp/env/reservit/#{ejbName}/local</param-value>
</context-param>

<servlet>
<servlet-name>Faces Servlet</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>javax.faces.webapp.FacesServlet</servlet-class>
<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>

<!-- Faces Servlet Mapping -->
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>Faces Servlet</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>*.seam</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

<ejb-local-ref>
<ejb-ref-name>reservit/BookingListAction/local</ejb-ref-name>
<ejb-ref-type>Session</ejb-ref-type>
<local>org.jboss.seam.example.booking.BookingList</local>
<ejb-link>BookingListAction</ejb-link>
</ejb-local-ref>
<ejb-local-ref>
<ejb-ref-name>reservit/RegisterAction/local</ejb-ref-name>
<ejb-ref-type>Session</ejb-ref-type>
<local>org.jboss.seam.example.booking.Register</local>
<ejb-link>RegisterAction</ejb-link>
</ejb-local-ref>
<ejb-local-ref>
<ejb-ref-name>reservit/ChangePasswordAction/local</ejb-ref-name>
<ejb-ref-type>Session</ejb-ref-type>
<local>org.jboss.seam.example.booking.ChangePassword</local>
<ejb-link>ChangePasswordAction</ejb-link>
</ejb-local-ref>
<ejb-local-ref>
<ejb-ref-name>reservit/HotelBookingAction/local</ejb-ref-name>
<ejb-ref-type>Session</ejb-ref-type>
<local>org.jboss.seam.example.booking.HotelBooking</local>
<ejb-link>HotelBookingAction</ejb-link>
</ejb-local-ref>
<ejb-local-ref>
<ejb-ref-name>reservit/HotelSearchingAction/local</ejb-ref-name>
<ejb-ref-type>Session</ejb-ref-type>
<local>org.jboss.seam.example.booking.HotelSearching</local>
<ejb-link>HotelSearchingAction</ejb-link>
</ejb-local-ref>
<ejb-local-ref>
<ejb-ref-name>reservit/LoginAction/local</ejb-ref-name>
<ejb-ref-type>Session</ejb-ref-type>
<local>org.jboss.seam.example.booking.Login</local>
<ejb-link>LoginAction</ejb-link>
</ejb-local-ref>
<ejb-local-ref>
<ejb-ref-name>reservit/LogoutAction/local</ejb-ref-name>
<ejb-ref-type>Session</ejb-ref-type>
<local>org.jboss.seam.example.booking.Logout</local>
<ejb-link>LogoutAction</ejb-link>
</ejb-local-ref>
</web-app>

Update the JPQL queries.

I found the booking example queries would not parse correctly with the Glassfish/Toplink persistence manager [note: you need to update the persistence.xml file to use Glassfish/Toplink]. I presume this is a standard‘s thing – but I don‘t know which implementation is correct. You will need to change queries of the form:


bookings = em.createQuery("from Booking b where b.user.username = :username order by b.checkinDate")

To this:

bookings = em.createQuery("select b from Booking b where b.user.username = :username order by b.checkinDate")

Fix the s:link tags

I found that the linkStyle=“button” attribute of the SEAM link tag causes XML parsing errors. This could be a facelets and/or JSF 1.2 bug? (suggestions welcome). I removed this attribute – which fixes the XML parsing error at the expense of not rendering the link as a button. Change this:

<s:link value="Cancel" action="login"  linkStyle="button" buttonClass="button"/>

To this:

<s:link value="Cancel" action="login" buttonClass="button"/>

Fix XML parsing wierdness.

This falls into the not-really-sure-what-I-am-doing category. I found a lot of parsing errors with the facelet .xhtml files. In particular:

1. I found the DOCTYPE header on most of the .xhtml files caused problems. This appears to be related to the facelets templating mechanism. Getting rid of the header made this problem go away.

2. Non breaking spaces such as amp;nbsp; or amp;#160; caused parsing problems. Once again – this looks like some kind of templating problem.

3. Beware of comments. While experimenting I would often put suspect code in XML comments. That is, until I realized the comments are parsed by the facelets template engine, causing runtime parsing errors.

If you have suggestions please leave a comment!