JBoss Seam vs. Oracle ADF

Well, now I've seen two sessions with two very different frameworks heading for the same thing: make the development experience of today's java applications easier. Gavin King did a very comparable demo to Shai Schmeltzer: some JPA stuff, some JSF stuff, binding them together. Seam looks interesting, but I have to think about some reasons why I would use that. ADF in comparison, looks much more integrated on the first view and has much better support in the IDE. The ideas and what you do, are likely the same, in both cases.

JPA, EJB3, JSF and ADF

Cool. Shai Schmeltzer has shown a life demo of new Jdev 11g. The demo was like the ones I showed for ADF some years ago: build some EJBs, generate DataControls for them and use them in a web page. Just that I used EJB 2.1 or BC4J and a Struts/JSP stack. Shai used the new EJB 3 stuff together with JPA and JSF. Looked very straight forward, good wizard support, code insight for annotations, easy. The datacontrol concept hasn't changed, just generates the XML metadata for a "service". What's very great is the new JSF design experience. Highlights: template support, graphical pageflow for navigation rules, region support. Regions are very smart: you can display portlets in a region or complete sub-pageflows. Just define a sub-pageflow like a normal pageflow, drop it in a region and you a have a micro pageflow in the main page. Design experience is great: very fast, very useful features, much clearer UI and concepts are more intuitive than in earlier releases. And: all the AJAX rich client components are Open Source now, too (like Trinidad before). I'm curious on how this will proove in first real life projects.