Getting Started with JBoss Developer Studio

While launching, server output is written to the Console view:

When the server is started you should see Started in the square brackets right next its name in JBoss Server View.

When the server is stopped you will see Stopped in the square brackets next to its name.

Here you can specify some common settings: host name, server name, runtime as well as settings related to the publishing, timeouts and server ports.

A new JBoss Server should now appear in the JBoss Server view.

Now, we are ready to create the first web application.

All settings are already specified here, you can just modify the Configuration. Click on the Modify... button to configure your custom facets pattern:

On the whole the dialog allows to select the "features" you want to use in your project. Doing this JBoss Developer Studio setups 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 the default configuration, Dynamic Web Module, Java, JavaServer Faces (JSF), and Seam Facet are already selected for a typical database-driven web application. The default project facets should suffice.

In the Project Facets form you can also bring up server runtimes panel by clicking Runtimes tab on the right corner. This panel shows available server runtimes.

Click on Ok and then 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.

Next wizard step needs more settings that previous. Let's start with General section.

Leave the default Seam runtime and check a WAR deployment.

Next Database section is a little tricky. The Connection Profile needs to be edited so that the new project works properly with the external HSQLDB server. By default the project wizard tries to use the JBoss embedded HSQLDB, but the tutorial uses an external database to replicate a more real world development scenario. Click on Edit to modify the Connection Profile.

Select JDBC Connection Properties. Make sure the URL is set to jdbc:hsqldb:hsql://localhost:1701

Try click on Test Connection button. It probably won’t work. This happens if the hsql jdbc driver is not exactly the same. This can be worked around by modifying the HSQLDB database driver settings. To modify the settings, click the “...” next to the drop-down box.

The proper Driver JAR File should be listed under Driver File(s). Select the hsqldb.jar file found in the database/lib directory and click on Ok.

Select Hypersonic DB and click on Ok. Again, this only happens if the selected hsqldb.jar is different from the running database.

Now, the Test Connection should succeed. After testing the connection, click on Ok.

You can leave the Code Generation section as is. It refers to Java packages in which the generated code will be placed.

Click on Finish button. Now, there should be a new Seam project called “workshop” listed in Package Explorer view.

The view tier of the application is also important. Seam uses facelets and there is a built-in facelets GUI editor that has some nice WYSIWYG and component drag/drop functionality. Try this out by opening home.xhtml from WebContent folder.

Notice that the templates reside in the WebContent/layout folder. There is a stylesheet in the WebContent/stylesheet folder. There is also a login and default error page. The Facelet editor will be explored in more detail later in the lab.

The project already has a datasource that was created per the Seam project wizard database settings. And, obviously all of the Seam specific configuration files and JAR dependencies are included and placed in the proper locations. On last noteworthy line item is related to the build script. There isn’t a build script because the Eclipse WTP(Web Tools Project) plugin is used to publish web application changes. As you can see, JBoss Developer Studio is removing a great deal of complexity from the enterprise Java project setup/deployment process. The end result is a developer that is writing code, not spending days/weeks trying to figure out how to get a decent development environment and project build process.

Now, open the MyAction.java file and replace the "myAction" method with this logic:

public void myAction() {
Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();
log.info("myAction.myAction() action called");
facesMessages.add("MyAction Executed on:" + cal.getTime());
}

You also need to import the java.util.Calendar class by clicking CTRL + Shift + O.

The test case simulates a Seam component/method execution for the MyAction.myAction() logic.

To run the test case, right click on MyActionTest.xml and click Run As > TestNG Suite or use the Run As... toolbar shortcut as shown below.

With any luck, the test case will pass. Look at the TestNG view.

Now, it’s safe to test the new Seam Action in a web browser. The fastest way to do that is to right click on myAction.xhtml and use Run As... > Run On Server which will show the appropriate url in the browser. Alternatively you can manually enter http://localhost:8080/workshop/myAction.seam into a browser.

Right click on the "myAction!" button in the visual part of editor and select <h:commandButton> Attributes.

Change the value of the button to something different. If desired, you can change any other text on the page. Then, type CTRL + S to save the facelet.

Refresh http://localhost:8080/workshop/myAction.seam and now you should see your changes.

Notice that you did not have to publish the application. JBoss Developer Studio auto-published it for you.

The secured button is not visible because the user isn’t logged in as "admin".

The user is logged in as "admin". Securing components is easy but securing pages is pretty simple as well.

Open WebContent/WEB-INF/pages.xml . Then add this markup directly underneath the <pages> element:

<page view-id="/myAction.xhtml" login-required="true"/>

Refresh http://localhost:8080/workshop/myAction.seam If you are not logged in you will get bounced back to the login page.

Thus, if you enter login credentials for the "admin" user, you will be re-directed to the secured page and secured component. If you enter different login credentials, page access will be granted, but the secured component will not be displayed.

Congratulations! You have secured your new action both at the facelet component and page level. You also added custom authentication logic to the login action.

Right click on CUSTOMERS, select Data > Sample Contents to view the data in the table.

There should be a SQL Results view on the workbench, but it could be hidden. Click on the "Result1" tab in the right side and you should see the data in the CUSTOMERS table.

Congratulations! You just connected to the workshop database and queried the content using Database Explorer tools.

On the next page use the Include button to include all the tables from the database and click Finish.

After running the Generate Entities action, you will see new org.domain.workshop.entity classes. These classes represent insert/update/delete/query logic.

Congratulations! You now have a fully functioning CRUD application that is already AJAX enabled.

Look at the Hibernate Configurations view. In the "workshop" project, drill down on the Session Factory and notice that the JPA entities/attributes are listed in a nice tree view.

Right click on the Session Factory and select HQL Editor. This will open a JPA query scratch pad window.

Write your query and click on the "Hibernate Dynamic SQL Preview" tab. You should see the SQL that will be executed if this JPA query is run.

Run the query by clicking on the green run icon.

The results are listed in the "Hibernate Query Result" tab. There is a "Properties" tab in the workbench that can be used to see a specific JPA result. These results represent the JPA objects because our query did not specify column names.

The query can be refined, and take note that there is nice code completion in the JPA query editor.

A refined query will return results that are more ResultSet oriented. Notice the join logic that JPA supports.

There was no need to specify an Employees table in the from part of the JPA query because JPA supports reference traversal via Java class attribute references. Not only are JPA and HQL queries fully supported, but Criteria based queries can also be written in the Criteria Editor. You should spend some time tinkering with different queries and possibly Criteria based queries, even though the instructions are not provided in this lab.

You see a Diagram tab for the CUSTOMERS table and any tables that have FK references. This is a handy way to view the data model and JPA mappings. Now, you’ve got access to something that the Erwin Data Modeler can’t do.

Also, replace the QTY Ordered input field with a inputNumberSlider. You can use the JBoss Developer Studio palette or right click on the form and insert the RichFaces component.

One the last option is to use the source view and manually copy the inputNumberSlider markup listed below:

<rich:inputNumberSlider id="quantityOrdered" required="true"
                                                               value="#{orderdetailsHome.instance.quantityordered}"/>

The end result is an edit page that has better form labels and a new RichFaces control.

Congratulations! You have completed the JBoss Developer Studio lab.

After changes made your hello.jsp page should look like this:

This line will actually output "Hello World!" message in the Console. To make the message displayed in the Browser, just replace this line with the simple Hello World!.

Both modes are fully synchronized. Let's add mapping to our hello.jsp page in web.xml file.

<welcome-file>hello.jsp</welcome-file>

If you come back to Tree mode you will see that the changes made are automatically reflected in that mode.

Actually you don't really need to do any configurations right now.

Thus with the help of this chapter you've learnt how to organize a Dynamic Web Project with a minimal configuration, add any staff to it (in our case it's just one jsp page) and deploy and run it on the JBoss Server shipped with JBDS.

First let's declare the properties file in inputnumber.jsp page using the loadBundle JSF tag.

<f:loadBundle basename="game.messages" var="msg"/>

As always JBDS provides code assist:

JBDS will nicely propose you to choose within available values:

<h:inputText id="userNumber" value="#{NumberBean.userNumber}" required="true">

           <f:validateLongRange minimum="0" maximum="100"/>

</h:inputText>

inputnumber.jsp page should look like this:

<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html" prefix="h" %>

<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core" prefix="f" %>

<f:loadBundle basename="game.messages" var="msg" />

<html>

<head>

<title></title>

</head>

    <body>

        <f:view>

            <h:form id="inputNumbers">

                <h:outputText value="#{msg.how_to_play}" />

                <br />

                <h:messages style="color: blue" />

                <br />

                <h:inputText value="#{NumberBean.userNumber}" id="userNumber"

                    required="true">

                    <f:validateLongRange minimum="0" maximum="100" />

                </h:inputText>

                <br />

                <br />

                <h:commandButton value="#{msg.makeguess_button}"

                    action="#{NumberBean.checkGuess}" />

            </h:form>

        </f:view>

    </body>

</html>

This page, success.jsp, is shown if you correctly guessed the number. The <h:outputFormat> tag will get the value of success_text from the properties file. The {0} in success_text will be substituted for by the value of the value attribute within the <f:param> tag during runtime.

At the end, you have a button which allows you to replay the game. The action value references a backing bean method. In this case, the method only terminates the current session so that when you are shown the first page, the input text box is clear and a new random number is generated.