JBoss Seam is a Java EE application framework whose many roles can make it hard to introduce and explain. It turns out that the European Union (EU) is a good metaphor for Seam, and not just for the humour-value.

A unified model

The EU is a political framework that allows for some integration between member states and provides a standard interface for interaction between them. This is also what Seam does for Java EE APIs. On the other hand, Seam does not have its own flag.

Members

See if you can find a tenuous connection (middle) between each technology that JBoss Seam integrates (left) and an EU member state (right).

Improvements

Perhaps the area where the metaphor breaks down is in the area of improvements. Not everyone in the EU agrees that EU law improves on the member states' own way of doing things. This differs from Seam, for example, because Seam has indisputably taken JSF and provided alternatives for its worst shortcomings, such as how annotations in Seam components replace so much XML. The EU, on the other hand, is rarely credited with increasing agility or efficiency. Or escape from XML Hell.

Peter Hilton is a senior software developer at Lunatech Research.

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