ICEsoft announced today the release of its ICEfaces 1.6 rich-client development library. The major new feature of this release is tight integration with JBoss Seam, an open-source framework for stateful Web application development:

The ICEfaces development team has been working closely with the JBoss Seam team to build a vibrant ecosystem of Ajax-based capabilities for Seam. Included in this integration are enhancements to SeamGen that support the rapid generation of functional Seam and ICEfaces applications.

The ICEfaces 1.6.0 release also contains a number of source code examples; among these is the ICEfaces + Seam Component Showcase that illustrates the entire ICEfaces rich component suite, functioning within a Seam-based application.

ICEsoft's ICEfaces 1.6 press release quotes Seam project founder Gavin King:

The integration of Seam and ICEfaces validates the strength of the Seam ecosystem and underscores our commitment to developer choice and productivity by supporting multiple Ajax technologies within Seam... With ICEfaces 1.6, developers can transparently add Ajax to their Seam applications and benefit from the collaboration capabilities of Ajax Push and the productivity gains of auto-generating ICEfaces + Seam applications with SeamGen.

Other significant product features include:

• Integration with Liferay Portal
• Enterprise Production Suite (EPS) has been open-sourced
• Support for JSF 1.2
• Early integration with Spring Web Flow
• New application server support for Glassfish, SAP NetWeaver 2007 and Webtide Jetty
• Updated IDE tool integration bundles
• New browser support for Opera and Opera Mobile (preliminary)
• Support for integrating Apache MyFaces Tomahawk components
• New Collapsible Panel component
• Open Ajax Hub compliance
• ICEfaces Ajax bridge prevents cross-site request forgery exploits

What do you think of the combination of ICEfaces and Seam for rich-client development?