Getting Started with JBoss Developer Studio

With the help of its page you will be able:

Start work with JBoss Developer Studio by clicking on Workbench button or simply close the welcome page.

Next, you will be asked to select the "features" you want to use in your project. This allows JBoss Developer Studio to setup the appropriate tooling for your project. Since JBoss Seam integrates all popular Java EE frameworks, you can select any combination of technologies from the list. Here, for this project, we will select Dynamic Web Module, Java, JavaServer Faces (JSF), and Seam Facet for a typical database-driven web application.

In this screen you can also bring up server runtimes panel by clicking Show Runtimes in the bottom right corner. This panel shows available server runtimes. Then this button will be changed into Hide Runtimes one.

Click Next to proceed further.

A dynamic web application contains both web pages and Java code. The wizard will ask you where you want to put those files. You can just leave the default values or choose another folder.

On the next form, you will be able to select where those library JARs come from. The easiest is just to select the JARs provided by the JBoss AS runtime associated with this project. That is why it is important to chose the right JBoss AS 4.2 runtime in the project setup window.

We will also use a default Hibernate Dialect - org.hibernate.dialect.HSQLDialect and deploy as a war archive.

The project setup wizard also asks you to configure how Seam generates code for the project. The Seam Home Folder should point to a valid Seam distribution. By default, it is set to the Seam distribution bundled in your JBoss Developer Studio tool. If you need another one choose setting up the appropriate check box:

If in this list there is no Seam runtime you want to use add it through Window > Preferences > JBoss Tools > Web > Seam or just click Add button near the Seam Runtime list:

For the deployment format, choose WAR deployment if you want to use POJOs for UI event handling and business logic; choose EAR deployment if you want to EJB3 beans for added features. In most web applications, the WAR deployment option would suffice. You should also enter Java packages for the entity beans (for database mapping) and session beans (for action handlers). All generated code will be placed in those packages.

Click on Finish to generate a project. The generated project contains all the necessary library JARs, XML configuration files, the ANT build script, as well as simple XHTML web pages and Java classes for the skeleton web application. The project will be shown in Project Explorer as well as in Seam Components view. If Seam Components view is not open select Window > Show View > Seam Components .

You can hide unused Seam components from this view.

Once you finished editing, save the file ( File > Save ), and reload the browser to see the changes.

Notice that we do not need to re-build and re-deploy the application. Just save the edited page and reload the browser.

The wizard generate a web page with a single text input field and an action button. Notice that the generated page uses layout/template.xhtml as a template. The template page provides the page header, footer, side menu, and CSS styles (see the template.xhtml for more details). The simpleAction.xhtml is assembled into the template when the simpleAction.seam URL is loaded.

<!DOCTYPE composition PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" 

                "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">



  <ui:composition>  xmlns:s="http://jboss.com/products/seam/taglib"

                              xmlns:ui="http://java.sun.com/jsf/facelets"

                              xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core"

                              xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html"

                              template="layout/template.xhtml">



<ui:define name="body">



    <h:messages globalOnly="true" styleClass="message"/>



    <h:form id="simpleActionForm">

        <rich:panel>

            <f:facet name="header">simpleAction</f:facet>

                    <s:decorate id="valueDecoration" template="layout/edit.xhtml">

                        <ui:define name="label">Value</ui:define>

                        <h:inputText id="value" required="true"

                            value="#{simpleAction.value}"/>

                    </s:decorate>

                    <div style="clear:both"/>

         </rich:panel>

         

         <div class="actionButtons">

             <h:commandButton id="simpleAction" value="simpleAction"

                             action="#{simpleAction.simpleAction}"/>

        </div>

    </h:form>

</ui:define>



</ui:composition>

The #{simpleAction.value} notation on the web page maps to the "value" property in the backend component named "simpleAction", and the #{simpleAction.simpleAction} notation indicates that the simpleAction() method is called when the button is clicked on. Here is the "simpleAction" named backend Seam component generated by the wizard.

package org.domain.MySeamProj.session;

    

import org.jboss.seam.annotations.Name;

import org.jboss.seam.annotations.In;

import org.jboss.seam.annotations.Logger;

import org.jboss.seam.log.Log;

import org.jboss.seam.core.FacesMessages;

import org.hibernate.validator.Length;

    

@Name("simpleAction")

public class SimpleAction {


    @Logger private Log log;


    @In

    FacesMessages facesMessages;


    private String value;


    //seam-gen method

    public void simpleAction()

    {

        //implement your business logic here

        log.info("simpleAction.simpleAction() 

              action called with: #{simpleAction.value}");

        facesMessages.add("simpleAction #{simpleAction.value}");

    }


    //add additional action methods


    @Length(max=10)

    public String getValue()

    {

        return value;

    }


    public void setValue(String value)

    {

        this.value = value;

    }


}

Load the Simplepage.seam in the web browser. Type something in the text field and click on the "simpleAction" button. A JSF message containing the input string is created by the simpleAction.simpleAction() method. The message is displayed on the page via the <h:message> tag.

Seam supports many different input validation annotations. To see an example, you can replace the @Length(max=10) annotation with the following. It would require the input string to have a first name and last name separated by a space. If the validation fails, the web page would print the customized error message.

@NotNull

@Pattern(regex="^[a-zA-Z.-]+ [a-zA-Z.-]+",

      message="Need a firstname and a lastname")

public String getValue()

{

        return value;

}      

Save the Java file, deploy the application, and reload the browser to see the new validation scheme in action.

A jspHello node should appear in the upper-left Package Explorer view.

Our hello.jsp page will now appear in Project Explorer.

As the project has been set up, new JSP pages should be created now.

On the diagram you will see two created views.

makeguess_button=Make Guess

trayagain_button=Play