Today I was reading through the list of seminars to choose from at JavaOne. I received an email letting me know that all attendees must use the online schedule builder to build a schedule for the 4 day conference. I couldn't believe it, there were 373 seminars to choose from, and they go from 9:30 AM - 10:00 PM every day (some up until 11:45 PM)! It took me hours to go through them all and choose which to attend. Sometimes it was difficult to choose because I wanted two or more, but they were starting at the same time. I now have my schedule built and can't wait to attend. This is not just a tradeshow, this is an education! They teach you all kinds of industry best practices, the latest tools and libraries, and everything on your things to learn list. I didn't pay too much attention to which seminars are hands on, but I do know that the advanced web services security and dtrace training that I'm signed up for are both hands on.

While choosing, I noticed a couple back-to-back seminars on JBoss Seam, JBoss' web framework built on top of JSF. I have been using Sun's Visual Web Pack for a while (an alternative framework built on top of JSF) and had several major issues for the types of project I need to do. Sun employees told me that VWP was not made for those types of apps. For the most part I enjoyed working with it, but the issues I have are too big of a problem.

I have read that Seam is very good and noticed that it looks like a polished product based on their website. It was too late to swith my project over because it was completed by then. Another framework built on JSF that I have talked enthusiastically about before is Apache Shale. The features list describes exactly what I want, but it is too poorly documented and not officially relesed (alpha?).

I signed up for the JBoss Seam seminars so that I can learn more about it. Until JSF 2.0 is designed and standardized, Seam might be the right solution for me. I've read that it can use facelets (big +++++ for me), there's a NetBeans module to work with it, it will run on Sun Application Server 9, and there are some groundbreaking features that they have created that are becoming JSR standards. These features will be incorporated into the new JSF 2.0 standard. I think if I use Seam, the transition to JSF 2.0 won't be too bad since JSF 2.0 will have many of the same features.