The MyFaces Orchestra project contains various tools and goodies that are focussed on making Java EE application development easier and more productive. In particular, the conversations feature is very powerful as it gives us an elegant way to handle persistence transactions that have to span multiple screens. By using this feature, we can solve one of the shortcomings mentioned at the end of the previous chapter. This chapter guides you through the basic setup of Orchestra, which is not trivial as it also involves adding the Spring framework to the project. After the setup, we will look at Orchestra’s conversations feature. We will also have a quick look at some other useful Orchestra features.
It should be noted here that some of the shortcomings that Orchestra fixes are also fixed in the JSF 2.0 specifications. But as JSF is still a View-oriented standard, it cannot offer the tight integration with a persistence layer that Orchestra uses to automatically manage...