In terms of the sheer number of moving parts, extravagance, and complexity, the build-tool landscape is one of bells and whistles that can be a little tough to stay on top of. There are a few important pieces of a robust and valuable build, no matter what tools you use to achieve it, and by breaking the build into modules or categories, we can make a little bit of sense out of the chaos.

Tired of messy logging logic cluttering your code with a bunch of if/else statements? Don’t let logging cramp your style! The approach Seam takes to logging makes your code pretty again (and other things). What does this mean for you? No more “code guards“!

A nice byproduct of the genius of Seam’s design is that many common problems can be solved by using EL as veritable swiss-army knife. We’ll look at this through a logging example specifically, though it’s just one of many different innovative ways of solving problems using Java5 features and EL as a general approach.