JBoss Seam 1.0 is described by the company as "a powerful, new application framework for Web 2.0 applications that unifies and integrates popular service-oriented architecture (SOA) technologies such as Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), JavaServer Faces (JSF), Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 3.0, Java portlets, business process management (BPM) and workflow."

JBoss, which is now a middleware division of Red hat Software, says Seam has seen strong community interest and has played a driving role for a new standards initiative for Web Beans through the Java Community Process (JCP) since its initial release.

Designed to eliminate complexity at the architecture and application programming interface (API) level, JBoss Seam enables developers to assemble complex web applications with simple annotated POJOs (plain old Java objects), componentized UI widgets and simple XML, the company says. To accomplish this, JBoss Seam extends the annotation-driven and configuration-by-exception programming model of EJB 3.0 into the entire web application stack. It bridges the artificial gap between EJB 3.0 and JSF in the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 5.0 (Java EE 5.0) architecture. The result is a unifying, tightly integrated application model that enables stateless, stateful, transactional and process-driven applications such as workflow and page flow.

The simplicity of Seam 1.0 will enable easy integration with other JBoss SOA technologies and Java Business Integration (JBI) in the future. Gavin King, founder and project lead of JBoss Seam and founder of Hibernate, commented: “Enabling the next generation of web development requires a major reconsideration of the underlying web application architecture. Until EJB 3.0, that had not been possible. As the first unifying and integrated framework for SOA technologies, JBoss Seam offers developers a rapid development environment and programming model that extends from the simple to the most complex web applications.”