JBoss: A Developer's Notebook

Chapter 3. Creating a Complete Application

Note

In this chapter:

• Building the EJB Tier

• Using XDoclet to Build the Web Tier

• Defining Users

• Deploying the Application

• Examining the Database

We’re going to take a big step, from a simple web application to a complete J2EE application with both a web and an EJB component. J2EE has a reputation for being complex and requiring a lot of configuration to make it work. That reputation is not entirely undeserved, but it is possible to work with J2EE and avoid much of the complexity.

We’ll use two tools to do this. The first is XDoclet. XDoclet is a code-generation tool that allows a developer to work with a single bean class instead of worrying about the myriad related classes that need to be developed. This model resembles the simplified EJB development model that will be introduced in EJB3, except that the metadata is stored in untyped Javadoc-style comments rather than proper language-level metadata. XDoclet also manages the generation of both J2EE and application server-specific deployment descriptors.

The second tool is JBoss itself. JBoss is extremely developer friendly in that you can quickly deploy an application on JBoss without worrying about database integration, security configuration, or any of the other details that can slow down your application development. That is exactly the approach we will take here. We won’t ignore those topics forever, but we will skip over them initially and let JBoss fill in the blanks. ...