The JBoss Seam framework provides elegant solutions to a number of problems. One of these problems is the concept of conversation management. Traditional web applications have a limited number of scopes (or container-managed memory regions) in which they can store data needed by the application at runtime.
In a typical Java web application, these scopes are the application scope, the session scope, and the request scope. JSP-based Java web applications also have a page scope. Application scope is typically used to store stateless components or long-term read-only application data. Session scope provides a convenient, medium-term storage for per-user application state, such as user credentials, application preferences, and the contents of a shopping cart. Request scope is short-term storage for per-request information, such as search keywords, data table sort direction, and so on.
Seam introduces another scope for JSF applications: the conversation scope. The...