Chapter 8. JBoss Seam and [fleXive]

Chapter 8. JBoss Seam and [fleXive]
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Daniel Lichtenberger <daniel.lichtenberger AT flexive.com>

Table of Contents

Authorization and Authentication

JBoss Seam is a widespread framework for rapid development of applications with JavaEE 5. It provides a neat wrapper around JSF and EJB that removes most of the "glue code" prevalent in many JSF applications that use EJB. Main features include a close integration of EJB persistence (JPA), a conversation scope for JSF, or business process management via jBPM.

This chapter is a quick guide to integrating [fleXive] into an existing Seam application.

Integration guide

To integrate [fleXive] with Seam, you need to

modify your build file to add the [fleXive] libraries to the packages EAR file, and
modify your web.xml and application.xml deployment descriptors.

Both tasks shouldn't take you more than a few minutes, and both are easy to undo.

First of all, you need unpack a [fleXive] distribution as described in Chapter 4, Writing [fleXive] applications . You don't need to actually start [fleXive], but you need access to the distribution directory.

When you have a local [fleXive] distribution installed, go to you Seam project directory and perform the following tasks:

Modify your build.xml: [fleXive] will copy all required libraries to the exploded-archives folder every time your application is built.
1. Include build.seam-project.xml at the top of build.xml. FLEXIVE-DIST is the path to your local [fleXive] distribution.
```
<project name="myseamproject" default="deploy" basedir=".">
    <import file="FLEXIVE-DIST/build.seam-project.xml"/>
```
2. Add a dependency for copyflexive to the archive target:
```
<target name="archive" depends="jar,war,ear,copyflexive" description="Package the archives">
```
To check if everything still works, you should build and deploy your application now.

Add a reference to flexive-ejb.jar to resources/META-INF/application.xml:

    <!-- Flexive EJBs -->
    <module>
        <ejb>flexive-ejb.jar</ejb>
    </module>

Add the [fleXive] filter and the Weblets listener to resources/WEB-INF/web.xml:

    <filter>
        <filter-name>FlexFilter</filter-name>
        <filter-class>com.flexive.war.filter.FxFilter</filter-class>
    </filter>

    <filter-mapping>
        <filter-name>FlexFilter</filter-name>
        <url-pattern>*.seam</url-pattern>
    </filter-mapping>

    <listener>
        <listener-class>net.java.dev.weblets.WebletsContextListener</listener-class>
    </listener>

The FlexFilter is needed to provide the [fleXive] context (e.g. the current user ticket) for every request, and Weblets is used to serve Javascript and CSS files needed by the JSF components.

Add a suffix pattern for the Faces Servlet as the last servlet mapping to resources/WEB-INF/web.xml. Otherwise all Weblets resources will have a .seam suffix instead of the original file extension.

   <servlet-mapping>
      <servlet-name>Faces Servlet</servlet-name>
      <url-pattern>*.seam</url-pattern>
   </servlet-mapping>

   <servlet-mapping>
      <servlet-name>Faces Servlet</servlet-name>
      <url-pattern>/faces/*</url-pattern>
   </servlet-mapping>

To test if the [fleXive] integration was sucessful, add the following code snippet to one of your front-end pages:

#{fxSystemBean.buildInfoVerbose}

It should render the [fleXive] version and build number. If no text is rendered, please check the logfile for error messages during the application startup. [fleXive] writes several status log messages on application startup, so you should see at least some messages originating from [fleXive].

When using [fleXive] UI tags on your pages, be sure to declare the fx namespace in your XHTML root element:

xmlns:fx="http://www.flexive.com/jsf/core"