Starting A Web Application Based On ZK CDI JPA and Jetty"

From Documentation
m
Line 7: Line 7:
  
 
=Introduction=
 
=Introduction=
Building a Java Web application is always started with a bunch of choices; Choices of which software architecture should pick, layers within picked architecture should be defined, and possible solutions or frameworks that each layer should use.
+
Building a Java Web application is always started with a bunch of choices: Choices of which software architecture should pick, layers within picked architecture should be defined, and possible solutions or frameworks that each layer should use.
  
 
In this series of article, I want to propose a practice of building a light weight web-app based on Java EE 6(Weld CDI, Hibernate JPA) and ZK on a simple web container (Jetty or Tomcat). And that might gives you an idea of a possible solution to start a Java web application.
 
In this series of article, I want to propose a practice of building a light weight web-app based on Java EE 6(Weld CDI, Hibernate JPA) and ZK on a simple web container (Jetty or Tomcat). And that might gives you an idea of a possible solution to start a Java web application.

Revision as of 02:12, 8 August 2012

WarningTriangle-32x32.png This page is under construction, so we cannot guarantee the accuracy of the content!

DocumentationSmall Talks2012AugStarting A Web Application Based On ZK CDI JPA and Jetty
Starting A Web Application Based On ZK CDI JPA and Jetty

Author
Ian YT Tsai, Engineer, Potix Corporation
Date
Aug 06, 2012
Version
ZK 6

Introduction

Building a Java Web application is always started with a bunch of choices: Choices of which software architecture should pick, layers within picked architecture should be defined, and possible solutions or frameworks that each layer should use.

In this series of article, I want to propose a practice of building a light weight web-app based on Java EE 6(Weld CDI, Hibernate JPA) and ZK on a simple web container (Jetty or Tomcat). And that might gives you an idea of a possible solution to start a Java web application.

in this article, I'll introduce the application stack and Java CDI technology by walking through a development Environment setup and application stack build-up, and the next article: XXXX I'll introduce some user scenarios and programming practices between each layers.

Application Stack Design

In tradition, a web application consists 3 tiers/layers, which are: Presentation, Business and Persistence. And the component that we are using for each layer of our application can be illustrated in this graph:File:3 tier archi.jpg

Using light-weight Web Container

I use Jetty rather than a heavy duty application server because:

  • Fast to reboot, especially in Eclipse. You can always restart it in 5 secs.
  • Popular and friendly to everyone. A lot of people hesitate to learn CDI because though it's designed for general purpose like Spring, but it is included in Java EE specification which means you need to use an application server to play with it. Studying how to use an application server nowadays is not a big problem but the natural barrier still higher than studying a simple web container.

Weld CDI, not entire Seam

I use Weld CDI only not the entire Seam framework because I want to focus on the key features of concept injections and strategies to dealing with the consistencies between CDI and web scopes.

In Memory Persistence

I use Hibernate JPA + HSQLDB here for minimal configuration, it is very easy to swap it with other DB.

Development Environment Setup

First, let's prepare our development environment, here is the project resource host link: XXXXXX. You can download & unpack the downloadable zip file or if you are familiar with Git, you can "git clone" it to your local directory. Now, let's see the prerequisites of this project.

Eclipse IDE Preparation

Please download Eclipse 3.6 or 3.7 JavaEE Developer's package, though Eclipse already announced it's newest version "Juno"(4.2), but I haven't make sure all required plugins are functional. The required plugins list is bellow:

  1. M2Eclipse: in order to shrink the project size and manage the project well, I use Maven to manage my project, and M2Eclipse can help you import the project into your eclipse workspace much easier.
  2. Run Jetty Run: a very light weight Jetty server runner to host the runtime of your web application.

Now let's see how to configure them.

Configuration & Composition

CDI in Jetty

JNDI Settings

Weld Settings

How about Tomcat

JPA Configuration

Persistence Unit

Entity Manager in CDI

Summery

Next Article