The choice is so bewildering that the framework inquiry is now the dominant greeting exchanged between developers at conferences. While the question "What do you do?" may have traditionally served in the role of sizing up a person's abilities, these days you are judged based on the merit of what framework you use for software development (or the advice that you can give pertaining to that choice). Just when you've made a decision, a new framework arrives on the scene promising to bury its predecessors.These choices can be harmful, especially to productivity. Barry Schwartz argues in The Paradox of Choice that having a bewildering array of options floods our already exhausted brains. The result is that your ability to write a quality application stalls. You keep believing that the best framework is the one you haven't tried yet. As a consequence, you spend more time researching frameworks than you do designing functional applications. The search consumes you. You develop a false sense of how busy you are. While you may appear busy, the fact is, you aren't accomplishing much.
If any of these choices were truly satisfying, than you probably would not be reading this book. You would already have a set of tools that you know, beyond all doubt, allows you to be highly productive. But,you don't, do you? You are still searching for a framework that is new, yet familiar. Lightweight, yet powerful.You are in need of a platform that integrates the vast landscape of Java technologies into a unified stack. Seam might be just the framework you are looking for.
