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

URL rewriting


Within web applications, it can be useful to perform URL rewriting in order to provide URLs in a more user-friendly and often shorter format. Typically, URLs are re-written to remove GET parameters, which can help us in making URLs more search engine friendly and ultimately resulting in a higher page ranking within search engines.

As we saw earlier in the book, the default file extension for a Seam web page is .seam. We can use URL rewriting to remove this extension. For example, using Seam's default configuration, the URL for a customer details page may be:

http://localhost:8080/enterprise/customer.seam

With URL rewriting, we can change this to:

http://localhost:8080/enterprise/customer

There's not really that much benefit in simply removing the .seam suffix from a URL. The major benefit occurs when we have HTTP GET parameters in the URL. URL rewriting allows us to remove these parameters and make them part of the URL.

Consider again our URL to access a customer's details. To access...