Section 1.3. The Example: JAW Motors

1.3. The Example: JAW Motors

We have tried to come up with an application that uses each layer of the J2EE collection in some sort of meaningful way. By design, this book is short on academic discussions and long on working code examples. Showing a coherent business application in action will hopefully give you a clearer idea of how the various layers interact, as opposed to a series of disjointed "Hello World" examples exercising each layer in isolation.

The JAW Motors application supports a fictitious automobile dealership. Each chapter progressively adds a new J2EE technology that solves a specific business problem. Viewing cars on a website involves JSP pages and some form of persistence (JDBC or Hibernate). Performing a credit check sends a JMS message and an email response using JavaMail. Purchasing a car requires the transactional support of Stateless Session Beans. Sharing data from the JAW Motors inventory with other dealerships involves setting up Web Services.

In addition to showing how JBoss works, we hope that these examples answer the how and why of each technology: how is it used, and why it should (or shouldn't) be used. Just because a hammer can sink a screw in drywall doesn't necessarily mean that it is the best tool for the job. The measure of a successful J2EE application isn't how many of the technologies it uses; it is how effectively each technology is used.

Source code for the JAW Motors application is available for download from http://www.jbossatwork.com. We encourage you to download the files and build them as you follow along in the book. We want you to literally see JBoss at work, not just read about it.

Before we get too far, let's make sure that you have all necessary tools to build and deploy the application to JBoss.