JEE Development

Sean Kelly (http://seankelly.tv/videos) created a few month ago a webcast comparing web application frameworks. It´s totally worth
watching it. So, due to the reason, that the webcast is nearly 2 years old, jee developers, managers and decision makers should also consider that there are new and interesting frameworks like appfuse,  seam and wicket to evaluate. Also the webcast contains only trivial demos.

Screencast URL: http://oodt.jpl.nasa.gov/better-web-app.mov

After or within the Requirements elicitations phase you often think about webflows and maybe basic functionalities on your web pages. Some functional requirements can be grouped together in web-/navigation-flows e.g. an order flow, an editable address book, a credit card edit page or a passwort retrieval within a web application. Different views like clickflows in particular, sitemaps (pages overview) and wireframes for each page can help you getting an idea about the whole thing. Additional informations can be included into use cases (see: Use Case on wikipedia)

Web page prototypes or mock-up screens, wireframes, clickflows can also help the page designers thinking about the user-interface and usability. Page designers, software architects, application- and UI-component developers can deliver input for the next step: the technical design specification. The technical design document contains informations about the appropriate architecture (platform, framework, library and software) and implementation details e.g. sequence and/or activity diagrams.

The processs shortly described above begins from the business view through the frontend and then to backend implementation. So i would say the implementation is a more frontend-driven process. At least you create a overall documentation with references, an operational handbook and if needed a userguide for your software.

In order to your requirements you can implement your enterprise application from a domain model . Some tools can help you by generating the needed classes for a crud (create, read, update, delete) application from the given domain model class diagram (domain driven development). This process goes from the backend to the frontend through the middle tier. This is in most cases a typical monolithic architecture but in nowadays the architecture is more service oriented. Architectures are following the SOA principles (see SOA on Wikipedia). Note that each architecture, monolithic with multi-tier layers or SOA landscapes have pro and cons. It´s up to you to find out what´s the best suited model/philosophy for your software. Your IT landscape has also some constraints to the maintenance staff, business view etc.

In my point of view the software development in the near future will be driven by business rules which are modeled and described with appropriate tools/languages like BPEL or JBPM. With JBPM you can model a particular business process. It´s also possible to group particular business processes together so that you get a new web flow or navigation rule for the whole business process. Think about a complete business process from customer registration to order to delivery to billing to maintenance. This software process is rule based way.

Tools for creating wireframes, mock up pages, sitemaps etc.:
- Axure,
- Omnigraffle (Mac),
- Concept Draw WebWave

ORM Data Mapper Frameworks:
- Hibernate,
- iBatis

JBPM:
- JBoss Tools 2.0.0.GA with integrated Hibernate Tools as a core component of JBoss Tools

Rules Engines based on JSR 94, Java Rule Engine API:
- JBoss Drools,
- JLisa,
- Ilog JRules,
- Jess,
- OpenRules

Note that the web application framework JBoss Seam 2 contains Hibernate (hibernate.jar, hibernate-annotations.jar, hibernate-commons-annotations.jar, hibernate-entitymanager.jar, hibernate-search.jar, hibernate-validator.jar) and Drools (drools-core.jar, drools-compiler.jar) as libraries within the framework. There exist a lot more frameworks/jar files within Seam 2 (overall 86 jars plus additional jars in lib/test and lib/src folder). See Seam 2 page for details or take a look into the JBoss Seam 2.0.0.GA Package.

seam 2 setup on windows vista 64bit

well, in this tutorial i show you how you can easily setup seam 2 (dvd store example) with MySQL on windows vista 64 bit.

First, download the required software:

MySQL Database (mysql-5.0.45-winx64.zip (64bit MySql))
MySQLAdministrator (32bit, mysql-gui-tools-5.0-r12-win32.zip)
MySQL Connector (mysql-connector-java-5.0.8.zip)
Java EE 5 SDK Update 4 (with JDK 6 U3) for Windows, English, java_ee_sdk-5_04-windows.exe, see: J2SE system configurations, Java on Windows, Sun installation notes)
Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers (eclipse-jee-europa-fall2-win32.zip),
Apache Ant 1.70 (apache-ant-1.7.0-bin.zip)
Xdoclet 1.2.3 (xdoclet-bin-1.2.3.zip)
Jboss 4.2.2 GA (jboss-4.2.2.GA.zip)
Jboss Seam 2 (jboss-seam-2.0.0.GA.zip)
Jboss Tools (JbossTools-2.0.0.GA-ALL-win32.zip),

After you have downloaded your files, create a folder C:\DEV on your Harddisk. This is the place where i installed my software.

For MySQL, MySQL Administrator and the SDK i used the setup routines to install the software. The other packages i have only extracted (zip) and moved to the right place. The folders look like this (i do not use blanks in foldernames!):

C:\DEV\apache-ant-1.7.0
C:\DEV\mysql5045
C:\DEV\SDK
C:\DEV\jboss-seam-2.0.0.GA
C:\DEV\jboss-4.2.2.GA
C:\DEV\xdoclet-bin-1.2.3
C:\DEV\eclipse-jee-europa-fall2-win32

Then i configured my IDE (eclipse-jee-europa-fall2-win32.zip):
To install Jboss tools you have to extract the Zip file (JbossTools-2.0.0.GA-ALL-win32.zip) and copy the content of the folder features to C:\DEV\eclipse-jee-europa-fall2-win32\features and the content of the folder plugins to the folder C:\DEV\eclipse-jee-europa-fall2-win32\plugins.

Right after that i configured Xdoclet to work with eclipse. I run eclipse and selected C:\DEV\workspace as my workspace folder. Within the workbench i selected: Window>Preferences>XDoclet and entered my Xdoclet path and the appropriate version 1.2.3.

Then i created a server instance of Jboss AS 4.2.2 by clicking on the „new server“ icon in the toolbar.

Add your JMX login credentials and click on finish. The next time you create a new project you can easily start and stop Jboss from your Eclipse IDE by selecting the server instance. Note the deploy directory of your Jboss instance.

Now i configured my windows environment variables and path. Goto the windows system control panel > system characteristics > Advanced tab > Environment variables and enter a the ANT_HOME variable with path pointing to your ANT folder (C:\DEV\apache-ant-1.7.0). Do not forget to check or set the JAVA_HOME variable and the path pointing to the bin folder of the SDK. Do not remove existing values. Just add the path for the SDK and ANT bin folders right after the existing values after the semicolon
(C:\DEV\SDK\jdk\bin;C:\DEV\apache-ant-1.7.0\bin;).

The Seam 2 „DVD Store“ store example is in the folder „C:\DEV\jboss-seam-2.0.0.GA\examples\dvdstore“. I opened the datasource file (dvd-ds.xml) for that example located in the folder „C:\DEV\jboss-seam-2.0.0.GA\examples\dvdstore\resources\“.Then i configured the mysql datasource like this:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>

<!DOCTYPE datasources
PUBLIC “-//JBoss//DTD JBOSS JCA Config 1.5//EN”
“http://www.jboss.org/j2ee/dtd/jboss-ds_1_5.dtd”>

<datasources>

<local-tx-datasource>
<jndi-name>dvdDatasource</jndi-name>
<connection-url>jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/dvdstore</connection-url>
<driver-class>com.mysql.jdbc.Driver</driver-class>
<user-name>yourusernamehere</user-name>
<password>yourpasswordhere</password>
<exception-sorter-class-name>
org.jboss.resource.adapter.jdbc.vendor.MySQLExceptionSorter
</exception-sorter-class-name>

<metadata>
<type-mapping>mySQL</type-mapping>
</metadata>
</local-tx-datasource>

</datasources>

Note that the values user-name and password are corresponding to an existing user within the MySQL Database. If you are not sure, open the MySQL Administrator and add a new user with password. Please also make sure that the MySQL Database Server is running as a Windows Service. If you have selected the „user administration“ (Benutzerverwaltung), point your mousepointer to the area where the accounts (Benutzerkonten) are and right click to create a new user account.

You should also have a blank schema called „dvdstore“ in your database. The user should have all privileges to that schema.To make the JDBC driver classes available to JBoss, copy the file mysql-connector-java-5.0.8-bin.jar from the Connector/J distribution to the lib directory in the default server configuration (assuming that is the configuration you’re running, of course. E.g.:
C:\DEV\jboss-4.2.2.GA\server\default\lib\mysql-connector-java-5.0.8-bin.jar).

Create a folder „jboss-seam-dist“ in your seam home folder:
C:\DEV\jboss-seam-2.0.0.GA\jboss-seam-dist

Add the following lines to your build.properties located in your seam home folder
C:\DEV\jboss-seam-2.0.0.GA


# added:
# Location of JBoss AS and Tomcat
# -------------------------------
#jboss.home /Applications/jboss-4.2.1.GA # Default
#tomcat.home /Applications/apache-tomcat-6.0 # Default
jboss.home C:\\dev\\jboss-4.2.2.GA
#tomcat.home C:\\Tomcat-6.0
#
# Misc Settings
# -------------
# Enabled validation of example XML descriptors
validate.xml true
# Directory in which to put build distribution, defaults to ../jboss-seam-${version}.${patchlevel}
dist.dir C:\\DEV\\jboss-seam-2.0.0.GA\\jboss-seam-dist
# alphanumeric qualifier for the version number
#qualifier -SNAPSHOT


Then i opened a dos console window. Goto the folder:

C:\DEV\jboss-seam-2.0.0.GA\examples\dvdstore>

and fire up the command:

ant

Your build should be successful. Otherwise something is going wrong within the configuration or installation.
The Jboss AS can be started by using the run.bat file. Open the DOS console window and goto C:\DEV\jboss-4.2.2.GA\bin
type run and press enter and the server will start.

When the server is ready and your application (ear) is successfully deployed to $JBOSS-HOME/server/default/deploy directory start the browser and enter the URL:

http://localhost:8080/seam-dvd/

note: the name is seam-[project name]
The correct project name is located in the file: C:\DEV\jboss-seam-2.0.0.GA\examples\dvdstore\readme.txt

i hope this tutorial helps you to dive into the seam 2 world.