Cmil Java EE 7 Development with WildFly

Leverage the power of the WildFly application server from JBoss to develop modern Java EE 7 applications
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-78217-199-7
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 434 Seiten

If you are a Java developer who wants to learn about Java EE, this is the book for you. It's also ideal for developers who already have experience with the Java EE platform but would like to learn more about the new Java EE 7 features by analyzing fully functional sample applications using the new application server WildFly.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Cmil, Michal

Fachgebiete

• Mathematik | Informatik EDV | Informatik Programmierung | Softwareentwicklung Software Engineering

Leseproben

Chapter 1. Getting Started with WildFly

Java Enterprise Edition provides a standard to develop enterprise software, but allows the developers to choose its specific implementation. For every technology that is included in the Java EE (Enterprise Edition) specification, there is a reference implementation; an open source library or component that fulfills all of the requirements. Companies and organizations can create their own versions of the components, which means that there is no central Java EE platform that everybody uses. In place of that, we get multiple approaches on the implemented specification, with improvements and optimizations for specific cases. At the time of writing this, there are about 20 certified (full) implementations of Java EE 6 and three implementations of Java EE 7.

An application server is a runtime environment that provides applications with all the Java EE components. Glassfish is the reference implementation sponsored by Oracle, but beginning from Version 4 (created for Java EE 7), there is no longer commercial support for it. In this book, you will learn how to develop applications on the WildFly Application Server, previously known as the JBoss Application Server.

JBoss is a division of Red Hat, which seeks to provide a developer-friendly open source ecosystem for enterprise development. Currently, the company supports multiple projects (around 100), and some of them are implementations of Java EE specifications. The enterprise elements are combined in JBoss's own application server, WildFly.

It is worth noting that the name change from JBoss AS to WildFly was made to separate the application server from the company and other subprojects. The name was chosen in a public vote (more information on this is available at http://jbossas.jboss.org/rename/vote).

The new release features a scalable and high performing web server called Undertow, which supports the HTTP upgrade mechanism and WebSocket protocol. What's more, the new version of the container is even faster than JBoss Application Server 7, and offers a unified configuration mechanism. However, the main essence of the latest release is the Java EE 7 compliance, which allows developers to use technologies from the newest version of the Java EE specification.

The focus of this book is on application development; therefore, we will first need to gather all resources required to deliver our applications. In this chapter, we will cover the following topics in detail:

• An overview of Java EE and WildFly
• Preparing your environment for the installation of software
• Downloading and installing WildFly
• Verifying the WildFly installation
• Installing other resources needed for development

An overview of Java EE and WildFly

Java EE (formerly called J2EE) is an umbrella specification embracing a standard set of technologies for server-side Java development. Java EE technologies include Java Servlet, JavaServer Pages (JSPs), JavaServer Faces (JSFs), Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI), Java Messaging Service (JMS), Java Persistence API (JPA), Java API for XML Web Services (JAX-WS), and Java API for RESTful Web Services (JAX-RS), among others. The newest version of Java EE extends the range of available technologies even further by providing support for Batch Applications, Concurrency Utilities, JSON Processing (JSON-P) and WebSocket. Several commercial and open source application servers exist, which allow developers to run applications compliant with Java EE; WildFly (formerly known as JBoss AS) is the leading open source solution adopted by developers and, although this is difficult to measure in exact terms, it is likely to be the most widely used application server in the market.

As with all application servers compliant with Java EE, WildFly ships with all the required libraries to allow us to develop and deploy Java applications that are built on the Java EE platform.

WildFly and Enterprise Application Platform

WildFly and previous JBoss Application Servers were freely available for the community in the form of downloadable binary packages (for major releases) or buildable source code (for bug fixing releases). These versions are called community releases and are free to use for development and production.

JBoss also releases more stable and hardened versions of software of the community builds, which are called Enterprise Application Platform (EAP), a commercial product with support service from Red Hat. Red Hat calls this kind of relationship between projects as upstream/downstream. The community builds are the source of changes and innovations for the downstream, the code is downstream. The commercial version numeration differed from the community line, but it was an extended variant of the community releases (for example, EAP 6.1.0 was built on JBoss 7.2.0, which was available only on GitHub in the form of buildable source code; the same goes for EAP 6.2.0 and JBoss 7.3.0). EAP builds have a more complex licensing system; the usage terms depend on the maturity of the build and are as follows:

• EAP Alpha is free for the developers and production use, as they are an equivalent of the standard community version with optional fixes included. The corresponding community binaries may not be available for download, as they would be similar to the EAP Alpha version.
• EAP Beta is available to developers for free (after registration to a subscription program), but cannot be used in production.
• EAP Final is also available to developers for free, but additionally, new security patches are available only in the paid subscription.

The distribution model proposed by JBoss allows the developers to work for free on the same version as the one used in production. This is a huge benefit, especially since the competitive solution from Oracle (Glassfish: the reference implementation of a Java EE compliant server) no longer has a version with commercial support.

Welcome to Java EE 7

Java EE 7 includes several improvements and additions to the existing version. The new version is focused on three themes: developer productivity, HTML5, and providing new features required by enterprise applications. The following sections list the major improvements to the specifications that are of interest to enterprise application developers.

If you are starting your adventure with Java EE, feel free to skip this section. The technologies described in the following sections will be covered in future chapters in more detail.

JavaServer Faces 2.2 – JSR 344

Java EE 7 includes a new version of the JSF specification, which is not so revolutionary as 2.0, but still provides some appealing additions for developers. The key features delivered by JSF 2.2 are as follows:

• The HTML5 markup is now supported by the usage of pass-through elements and attributes. Earlier, custom attributes would have to be supported by an extended renderer for every component. The new constructs allow the developer to pass additional HTML attributes to the markup generated by JSF components.
• The flow scope has been introduced with , which makes the creation of wizards (dialogs with multiple steps) easier.
• The Ajax-based file upload is now supported out of the box.
• Also, stateless views have been presented as a way to improve performance.

Enterprise JavaBeans 3.2 – JSR 345

Compared to EJB 3.1, the Version 3.2 is a minor update of the existing version. It concentrates mainly on marking some older features as obsolete (they are now optional, which means that not every Java EE 7-compliant application server will support them). The optional features are connected with persistence to web services based on EJB 2.1 and JAX-RPC. The main enhancements provided by the new specification are as follows:

• Life cycle methods for stateful session beans can now be transactional.
• The Timer Service API, now allows you to access all active timers in the current EJB module.
• A new container provided role () has been introduced. It can be used to indicate any authenticated user (without taking his or her actual roles into account).
• Passivation of stateful session beans can now be disabled.

Transactional parts of the EJB...