Chapter 1. Seam Tutorial
1.1. Using the Seam examples
Seam provides a number of example applications which demonstrate how to use a variety of Seam's features. This tutorial will guide you through a few of those examples to help you get started learning Seam. The Seam examples are located in the
examples subdirectory of the Seam distribution. The first example, on registration, is in the examples/registration directory.
Each example has the same directory structure:
- The
viewdirectory contains view-related files such as web page templates, images and stylesheets. - The
resourcesdirectory contains deployment descriptors and other configuration files. - The
srcdirectory contains the application source code.
Note that all examples are built and run from the Ant
build.xml, so you will need a recent version of Ant installed before you get started.
1.1.1. Running the examples on JBoss AS
The examples are configured for use on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. You will need to set
jboss.home, in the shared build.properties file (in the root folder of your Seam installation) to the location of your JBoss AS installation.
Once you have set the location of JBoss AS and started the application server, you can build and deploy any example by typing
ant explode in that example's directory. Any example that is packaged as an EAR (Enterprise Archive) deploys to a URL like /seam-example, where example is the name of the example folder, with one exception: if the example folder begins with "seam", the prefix "seam" is ommitted. For instance, if JBoss AS is running on port 8080, the URL for the Registration example is http://localhost:8080/seam-registration/, whereas the URL for the SeamSpace example is http://localhost:8080/seam-space/.
If, on the other hand, the example is packaged as a WAR, then it deploys to a URL like
/jboss-seam-example.
Note
Several of the examples — groovybooking, hibernate, jpa, and spring — can only be deployed as a WAR.
1.1.2. Running the example tests
Most of the examples come with a suite of TestNG integration tests. The easiest way to run the tests is to run
ant test.
It is also possible to run the tests inside your IDE using the TestNG plugin. This required you to run ant test before running or debugging Seam test cases in Eclipse IDE. Consult the readme.txt in the examples directory of the Seam distribution for more information.
