Current Project: Migrate from Seam2

One of the projects I’m currently working on is an application used for laboratory collaboration. The project started nearly 5 years ago as a small application (mostly) generated from an existing database by seam-gen. Of course some additional handwork was needed e.g. to implement workflows, export facilities, messaging and integration stuff – (Oracle Application Server 10.1.3 as production environment)

Today the application is still running fine and the users are still happy – I hope – but the technology behind it is getting quite old. Additionally new ideas came up and I really don’t like the thought about implementing them the old fashioned way. My Decision: Before I’m going to start implementing new things the old things needed a small refurbishment.

The first investigation result: I should take care of my old projects! Somehow I had missed the release of Seam 2.3 and it seems very easy to run the old application nearly unchanged on a newer system. Nearly unchanged – that was a little bit disturbing – What I wanted was the change! In the past five years so many new technologies came up and I have already done some new projects with JavaEE6/7 but never migrated an old application.

Next stop: https://github.com/seam/migration – very, very useful and could be seen as step-by-step manual for a migration project like this.

• Migrate to maven – DONE
• Migrate to JPA 2.0 – DONE
• Migrate to Bean Validation – DONE
• Migrate to CDI – NEARLY DONE
• Migrate to JSF 2.0 – DONE

The CDI migration part “Migrate Query / Home objects” was done with a little bit more of DeltaSpike. Additionally I used JBoss Windup to get some hints and an overview about the progress. An initial rules set is available here.