Two tools, one goal

Two tools, one goal

Using a seam-gen project in JBoss Tools

The Seam distribution includes a tool named seam-gen to help you get started quickly using Seam. The tool collects information from you about your project and then uses that information to create a project structure. It can also generate a CRUD application by reverse engineering your database schema and generate various forms of stub code. In this entry, you'll learn how to get the generated project setup in Eclipse so that you can leverage the available tooling.

Two tools, one goal

There are actually two interfaces to seam-gen. The first is the commandline script named seam, which resides at the root of the Seam distribution. When we talk about seam-gen, we are usually referring to this script. There is also new project wizard in JBoss Tools (the open source project behind JBoss Developer Studio) that is a complement to this script. Both tools share the same FreeMarker templates inside the seam-gen directory of the Seam distribution to produce the Java code, Facelets views, and TestNG configuration. Aside from these common templates, the two tools work independently of one another in setting up a Seam project. The projects they generate differ in one fundamental way, though. The commandline tool produces projects that are built using Ant, while the JBoss Tools new project wizard creates projects that are build purely with Eclipse builders.

As you'd expect, when you create a project using the Eclipse plug-in, you can immediately start taking advantage of the tooling support for Seam in your project. However, like me, you may find it important to have a project that can be built outside of Eclipse using Ant. That means creating the project using the seam-gen commandline script. Don't fear that by creating the project outside of Eclipse, that the IDE is reduced to a syntax checker and Java compiler. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how to fully activate the Seam tooling in Eclipse for projects created using the seam-gen commandline script, bringing you the best of both worlds. Plus, once the Seam tooling is activated, you can generate the CRUD application or stub code from either Eclipse or the commandline script.