I have come across a very nasty bug with SEAM and Icefaces when using the Facelets <ui:composition> tag.
When you wrap the <ice:inputText> tag with a Facelets <ui:composition> the Seam model validation stops working.
I have prepared an example using the icefaces booking example application that comes with version 1.1.6 of Seam. I have attached a zip file with the changes to demonstrate the bug. Unzip this over the icefaces example and you will see how the field length validation on name stops working when in the register screen.
Is this a bug that will be addressed in the next release?
It is a pretty major bug in my opinion as it prevents us from using any Facelets composition components (which we normally do extensively).
This is reproducible without ICEfaces in the normal Seam booking example. I've opened up a Seam bug for this: http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/JBSEAM-919 So, we'll see what they say.