I'm happy to say that Seam 2.1.1 is one step closer to being done. We've just released Seam 2.1.1.CR1, so please take a look and let us know what you think. CR1 is largely a bug-fix release, with a number of notable performance improvements, especially around hot deploy. We've added support for PDF forms to the iText integration, and there's preliminary support for OpenID, but you'll have to wait for CR2 for the example and docs. Seam-gen now generates IntelliJ IDEA projects. And, I should also point out that we've changed a few of the URLs on examples to match up better with the example names.

[Download] [Reference Documentation] [JIRA] [Release Notes] [Migration Guide]

Devoxx, the show formerly known as JavaPolis is coming up soon and while I was preparing for my talks I started browsing the full program and saw it is going to be great for anyone interested in Hibernate, Seam, JBoss Tools, JBoss AS and other JBoss technologies.

The list below is what I could find by browsing the program and it is a mix of JBoss and non-JBoss speakers. There is so many that I'm just going to list them and let the titles speak for them self:

Hibernate

Scaling Hibernate: tips, recipes and new perspectives BOF by Emmanuel Bernard and Max Rydahl Andersen.

A successful search, a happy user: make it happen! by Emmanuel Bernard

Envers - Easy Entity Versioning by Adam Warski.

Sharding in Hibernate by Andrew Glover.

Hibernate Performance Tuning by Volker Bergmann.

Seam and Web Beans

Introduction to Web Beans by Pete Muir

Seam in Action by Dan Allan

Seam, Web Beans and JBoss Tools BOF by Dan Allan, Pete Muir and Max Rydahl Andersen.

JSF, Ajax, and Seam portlet development with the JBoss Portlet Bridge by Thomas Heute

JBoss Seam and beyond by The RealDolmen and Belgium JBUG quartet.

JBoss Tools & Developer Studio

Editing xml and html with JBoss Visual Page Editor by Max Rydahl Andersen

Making full use of Hibernate Tools by Max Rydahl Andersen

Others

JBoss Application Server 5 by Dimitris Andreadis and Ales Justin

Declarative programming with Rules, Workflow and Event Processing by Mark Proctor and Kris Verlaenen

Profiler, the better debugger by Heiko Rupp

Systems management with project RHQ by Heiko Rupp

The JBoss SOA Platform by Mark Little

Mobicents Sip Servlets - Telco applications in Java by Vladimir Ralev

If I missed any, let me know ;)

Besides the above list I found that the program otherwise is looking really interesting this year - i'm looking forward to visit Antwerp again.

See you there.

I keep getting asked about the relationship between Seam and Web Beans. At a high level, the mission of the Seam project remains unchanged: to provide a fully integrated development platform for building rich Internet applications, based upon the Java EE environment. In Seam2, this platform consists of the following layers:

1. the contextual lifecycle, configuration and dependency injection model that forms the essential glue that makes everything work together in a consistent way
2. a set of modules that integrate other technologies such as JSF, jBPM, Hibernate, Drools, Groovy, Wicket and GWT, or solve common concerns such as security, asynchronicity and rendering PDF, email, Excel, RSS
3. tooling

The first layer is the part that is addressed by JSR-299. The spec defines a more elegant, more typesafe, more user-friendly, standard solution that is a huge improvement over Seam2 (and everything else out there). The value of this is more elegant, more typesafe, more loosely coupled application code. But for many people, the true value of Seam is that it provides a complete pre-built, pre-integrated stack of technologies, together with tool support. That's not the role of JSR-299.

So the goal of Seam3 is to take the second layer and port it to the Web Beans backbone. This will allow applications using the Web Beans programming model to take advantage of all the integrated technologies that make up Seam. A second immediate benefit is that Seam will integrate much more consistently and transparently with application servers that natively support Web Beans. Seam3 will probably be packaged in a more modular way than Seam2, allowing any Web Beans-based application to drop in Seam security, jBPM integration, Drools integration, etc. And hopefully, Seam won't be the only project providing infrastructure based upon Web Beans.

Of course, we want to make it's easy for people with Seam2 applications to migrate to Web Beans. There's two possible approaches and I'm not sure exactly which path we will take. We could:

• reimplement the core of Seam as a layer over the Web Beans backbone, or
• simply allow Seam2 and Web Beans to run side-by-side, with advanced interoperability between Web Beans and Seam2 components.

The first option sounds like a lot more work, but I suspect it might be easier than you would think.

Hibernate Search 3.1.0.CR1 is out. Download it here.

One of the main work was to align more closely with the new Lucene features:

• read-only IndexReader for better concurrency at search time
• use of DocIdSet rather than BitSet in filter implementations for greater flexibility
• explicit use of Lucene's commit()

We have also added a few performance tricks:

• avoid reading unnecessary fields from Lucene when possible
• use Hibernate queries when projecting the object instance (as opposed to rely on batch size)

@DocumentId is now optional and defaults to the property marked as @Id. Scores are no longer normalized (ie no longer <= 1)

The full changelog is available here. Expect a GA in the next two weeks. Help us iron this release and provide issue reports in JIRA.

Many thanks to Hardy for literally hammering out fixes after fixes and making the release happen on time.

I want to say something about the Panasonic DMC-LX3. I've never written a camera review before, but I'm so inspired by the fact that finally someone made a compact camera for people who actually know something about photography, that I want to do something to encourage this trend.

For the past 10 or 15 years, camera manufacturers have invested in one awesome technological leap - digital - and a bunch of verging-on-useless features that bamboozle new users and complicate usage for everyone. Here's a quick sampling of just some of the non-features of a typical compact camera:

• face detection
• baby mode
• multi-point autofocus (for all those folks who do action photography with a compact camera)
• in-camera image processing (useful for people who don't own computers)
• 10x zoom (at f5.6, of course)
• 15 megapixels (crammed onto a 1/1.7 inch sensor)

Some of these features are harmful because they actually guide the user to use the camera in exactly the wrong way. For example, multi-point autofocus is enabled by default, since it's apparently too difficult to teach users the correct way to take a photograph (first focus, then recompose). Others are harmful mainly because they distract the buyer's attention from what's really important in a camera.

I was so excited by the LX3 that I ordered one on Amazon before there were even any published reviews. How did I know to do this? Well, what most buyers of compact cameras don't know - and what even a lot of camera reviews tend to downplay - is that most of what matters in a camera can be expressed with exactly three numbers. Here they are, in approximate order of importance:

• the f ratio
• the focal length
• the size of the sensor

The f number tells you how much light the lens is able to capture. The smaller, the better. Most really good photos are taken in low-ish light conditions, or of moving subjects. Photos taken of still subjects in the middle of the day are usually boring, with ugly colors. Therefore, the more light you can get, the better your photos will be. Most buyers of compact cameras don't even know what an f number is, and the salespeople don't tell them.

The focal length determines the field of view. Unfortunately, almost all compact cameras are equipped with zoom lenses. In theory, a zoom lens makes a camera more versatile by offering a range of different focal lengths. Compact cameras are marketed on the basis of how much zoom they have (the ratio between the shortest and longest focal length). But in practice, cameras with more zoom take worse photos. It's very difficult to manufacture a good lens with a low f ratio and high zoom ratio. My gorgeous professional 16-35 f/2.8L costs $1300 and has just 2.2x zoom. A compact camera that costs $500 and boasts 10x zoom does not have a good lens! Furthermore, these zoom lenses generally begin at a fairly long focal length, robbing you of all the beauty of wide-angle photographs. Of course, there's no right or best focal length - the right focal length depends upon the subject matter. But, for the type of photographs that I use a compact camera for, I need some decent wide angle.

The size of the sensor limits the ugly digital noise that appears especially in low light conditions. It does not help to simply pack more and more pixels into a tiny space - resolution is not only limited by the number of pixels, but also by digital noise. A compact camera with a 15 megapixel sensor does not take photographs remotely comparable in sharpness and depth to an entry level SLR with a 12 megapixel sensor. That's because the sensor in an SLR is much larger. And a fullframe SLR like my 12.8 megapixel 5D is a different experience again. Unfortunately, a compact camera, by definition features a fairly small sensor.

So why is the LX3 different?

• f/2.0-2.8
• 24-60mm (35mm equivalent)
• 1/1.63-inch 10.1 megapixel sensor

By comparison, my previous compact camera (the best compact camera on the market when I bought it a year ago) was a Canon G9. I got a lot of use out of it this year on a motorcycle trip from San Francisco to Nicuragua, and I was just never very happy with it (unfortunately, there was no room on my bike for an SLR). The numbers tell the story:

• f/2.8-4.8
• 35-210mm
• 1/1.7 inch 12.1 megapixel sensor

Compared to the G9, the LX3 captures twice as much light, offers much more potential for dramatic wide-angle photographs, but has much less zoom (my experience is that the G9 takes ugly photographs at full zoom). In practice, this means I can take photos that I simply would not be able to capture using the G9.

Some examples:

Please bear in mind that most of these photographs were taken at night, by a drunk Australian.

Of course, the LX3 will never replace my 5D/16-35L combo. Don't expect it to rival any SLR with a decent lens. But I'm never going to take my 5D clubbing with me. So I could never have taken the photos above with the 5D. I can bring the LX3 almost anywhere. Most importantly, this camera is fun. I hate to admit, but I actually enjoy it more than an SLR...

Please buy this camera, even if only to help make it commercially successful. I already bought one for each of my sisters for Christmas this year :-)

UPDATE: a couple more points about the LX3:

• it's small, but jacket-pocket small, not trouser-pocket small
• yes, the lens cap is irritating - especially when your friends get their fingerprints all over the lens reviewing photos - but that's a small price to pay for such a great lens
• to my surprise, the ability to switch aspect ratio turns out to be more than just a silly gimmick - the native 16:9 aspect ration makes for some really interesting compositions
• the screen is so super-bright and contrasty that sometimes I'm tricked into thinking that an underexposed shot is fine :-/
• the images look great even after some pretty heavy post-processing which is unusual for a compact camera
• I hate and despise flash photography, but the couple of times I tried it, the flash seemed to be very well-metered (unlike other compact cameras I've used, this flash doesn't totally drain all color and depth from the scene and make everyone with white skin look like ugly hags) and if that's not enough, there's even a hotshoe for an external flash
• I would prefer a dial for fiddling aperture/exposure, but honestly the little joysticky thing seems to work just fine
• the mode dial at the top of the camera should be stiffer, it often shifts coming in and out of my pocket
• you have to enter the menus to change ISO, which is a major pain (but better than the stupid dial on the G9, which always got bumped coming in and out of the camera bag)
• it looks way sexier than the Canons