JBoss® Seam: Simplicity and Power Beyond Java™ EE

18. Managing Business Processes

In previous chapters, we showed that Seam is a great framework for developing stateful web applications. However, all our stateful application examples so far have dealt with only session states that are associated with a single web user, and those sessions have lasted only minutes to hours. In real-world business applications, the application state is often defined in long-running business processes involving multiple tasks and multiple actors. For instance, let’s examine a simple use-case scenario: An author edits a document that a manager must approve before sending it to the publisher. This very simple example involves several tasks (writing, approving, sending the manuscript, and publishing) and several actors ...