Patterns: Implementing Self-Service in an SOA Environment

Chapter 5. Product mappings and product overview 91

up the project. This field is selectable as at the time of this writing support for

Struts 1.2.x is being added to Rational Application Developer.

򐂰 A set of Struts Component Wizards define action form classes, action classes

with action forwarding information, and JSP skeletons with the tag libraries

included.

򐂰 The Struts Configuration Editor maintains the control information for the

action servlet.

򐂰 A graphical design tool edits a graphical view of the Web application from

which components (forms, actions, JSPs) can be created using the wizards.

This graphical view is called a

Web diagram. The Web diagram editor

provides top-down development (developing a Struts application from

scratch), bottom-up development (diagramming an existing Struts application

that you might have imported) and meet-in-the-middle development

(enhancing or modifying an existing diagrammed Struts application).

򐂰 Validators validate the Struts XML configuration file and the JSP tags used in

the JSP pages.

JavaServer Faces (JSF)

As with Struts development, JSF developers can also take advantage of the

many Web development features available in Rational Application Developer. In

addition, Rational Application Developer provides a set of views and wizards to

make working with JSF components simple. The New Faces JSP File wizard

creates a JSP for use with JavaServer Faces components and automatically

creates the corresponding backing bean. Built-in tools exist to simplify and

automate event handling and to simplify page navigation. The Palette view

contains a wide array of Faces components that you can drag and drop to the

Page Designer.

Development of a Web application using JSF can be seen in Chapter 9, “JSF

front-end scenario” on page 239.

5.4.2 EJB development

EJB development is done in the J2EE perspective. Rational Application

Developer supports the Enterprise JavaBeans 1.1, 2.0, and 2.1 specification

levels. Features for EJB development include:

򐂰 The Enterprise Bean wizard

This wizard creates stateless and stateful enterprise beans. You can choose

to create a session bean, message-driven bean, bean-managed persistent

entity bean, or container-managed persistent entity bean.