Chapter 3. Creating a Complete Application | JBoss: A Developers Notebook

Note: In this chapter:

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.

Note: We are focusing on J2EE applications. But don't think that JBoss is just a J2EE server. There is much more: AOP, Hibernate and MBeans,to name just a few.

The application we will build is a web-based ToDo list manager. Users can log into the application and manage a personal list of items they are working on. The web application is a JavaServer Faces application that talks to Enterprise JavaBeans? on the back end. Although it is fairly simple structurally, few J2EE applications get any more complicated than this.

The source code for the application is in the todo directory of the example code. You'll want to keep the application code within reach as we go through the example because we won't be focusing on the code. We will focus on what it takes to make an application run in JBoss. To that end, the actual code is little more than an application detail. You won't need to be overly concerned about the details. You can imagine any J2EE application that you have worked on in its place.

But that's enough talk. Let's get the application going.