n the Java enterprise development ecosystem, you'll find a wide proliferation of frameworks and solutions. However, unlike in the Microsoft development world, very few of them provide an end-to-end solution from the framework right down to development tools. JBoss is one of the few players in the Java world that has attempted—with pretty good results—to achieve smooth integration across its core development offerings:

• JBoss Tools
• Seam Web Framework
• JBoss EJB 3.0 Application Server
• RichFaces JavaServer Faces (JSF) Component Library
• Facelets
• Hibernate Validators

Together, these components comprise the JBoss web development stack. This article examines each of these offerings individually and then demonstrates how to set up a JBoss Tools environment for developing Seam applications.

Seam Web Framework
Seam provides the glue between the world of JSF and EJB 3.0 (see Sidebar 1. Seam and Web Beans) by allowing EJBs to act as managed beans (which gives you direct access to all the features of EJB 3.0, such as JPA and dependency injection). Also, it provides a new context called conversations, which allows you to tie a typical use case that spans multiple web pages into one logical unit easily (thus, avoiding the necessity to manipulate the session context to keep track of the current user process).