Book Image

Seam 2.x Web Development

Book Image

Seam 2.x Web Development

Overview of this book

The Seam framework from JBoss allows developers to use JSF, Facelets, EJB, and JPA to write conversational web applications. But you will first have to learn how these standard technologies are integrated using Seam and how they can be built upon using additional Seam components. If you need to build a Java web application fast, but don't have time to learn all these complex features, then this book is for you. The book provides a practical approach to developing Seam applications highlighting good development practices. It provides a complete walk through to develop Web applications using Seam, Facelets, and RichFaces and explains how to deploy them to the JBoss Application Server. You can start using key aspects of the Seam framework immediately because this book builds on them chapter by chapter, finally ending with details of enterprise functionality such as PDF report generation and event frameworks. First, the book introduces you to the fundamentals of Seam applications, describing topics such as Injection, Outjection and Bijection. You will understand the Facelets framework, AJAX, database persistence, and advanced Seam concepts through the many examples in the book. The book takes a practical approach throughout to describing the technologies and tools involved. You will add functionality to Seam applications after you learn how to use the Seam Generator RAD tools and how to customize and fully test application functionality. Hints and tips are provided along the way of how to use Seam and the JBoss Application Server.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Seam 2.x Web Development
Credits
About the author
About the reviewers
Preface

PDF document generation


The Seam Framework utilizes the iText library to allow PDF documents to be generated directly from the Facelets pages. iText is a pure Java library that provides an API for generating and manipulating Adobe PDF files.

Note

For more information on iText, visit http://www.lowagie.com/iText/

PDF required configuration

In order to use iText for PDF generation within Seam, we first need to copy the iText JAR files into our web application's class path and enable the document servlet. This is one of the instances where SeamGen doesn't currently configure an application completely for us.

To use Seam's PDF generation tools, we need to ensure that the itext.jar and itext-rtf.jar (that is, the iText JAR files) are within the web application's classpath. It's important to note that the web application's classpath is different to the EAR's classpath if you are deploying an application as an EAR file. To place these files within the web application's classpath, we can either place...