Building a Simple EJB Application –A Tutorial

By Jeevaraj Gnanaselvan Dhanaraj (jeevaraj_1970@yahoo.com)

(Jeeva has over 7 years of experience in designing and developing enterprise class web
applications using JAVA and J2EE technologies. He currently works for Itreya
Technologies, Bangalore, leading a team of over 10 programmers and designers,
developing a multi-user, distributed, web-based workflow application)

Introduction

In this tutorial we will create a simple session EJB and a client web application using
eclipse IDE along with Lomboz plug in and XDoclet. This application, while simple,
provides a good introduction to EJB development and some of the Web development
tools available.

· Environment
J2SDK 1.4.2
http://java.sun.com/

Eclipse 3.1

http://www.eclipse.org/

JBoss 4.0.2

http://www.jboss.org/

XDoclet 1.2.3
http://xdoclet.sourceforge.net

Lomboz 3.1RC2
http://lomboz.objectweb.org/

· Installation
Install JDK (in D:j2sdk1.4.2_04)

Install JBoss (in E:jboss-4.0.2)

Install Xdoclet (in D:xdocletxdoclet-1.2.3)

Install Eclipse (in E:Eclipse3.1)

Install Lomboz (in E:Eclipse3.1)

· Setting up
1. Set up the installed JRE in eclipse (Windows -> Preferences -> Java -> Installed
JREs)

2. Set up the installed runtime for server in eclipse (Windows -> Preferences ->
Server -> Installed Runtimes)
3. Set up Xdoclet in eclipse (Windows -> Preferences -> J2EE Annotations ->
XDoclet)

4. Set up the ejbdoclet for JBoss in eclipse (Windows -> Preferences -> J2EE
Annotations -> Xdoclet -> ejbdoclet)
· Creating a Session Bean
1. Open the J2EE perspective in eclipse (Windows -> Open Perspective -> Other ->
J2EE)
2. Create a new EJB Project from the Project Explorer (EJB Projects -> New -> EJB
Project)

3. Enter name as “SimpleEJBTutorial” and select project location as “E:Test”.

4. Now create a new Session Bean from the Project Explorer (EJB Projects ->
Simple EJB Tutorial -> ejbmodule -> New -> Other…)
 Note:

XDoclet is an extended Javadoc Doclet engine. It's a generic Java template engine
that lets us create custom Javadoc @tags and based on those @tags generate
source code or other files (such as deployment descriptors in xml form). XDoclet
supports a set of common standard tasks such as web.xml or ejb-jar.xml
generation. It uses special JavaDoc @tags to define settings for each component.
For example, putting a @ejb.bean name="Hello" jndi-name="Hello"
type="Stateless" in HelloBean.java

We have to edit only the HelloBean.java. All others are automatically generated
and XDoclet will regenerate them each time we make a change to the HelloBean
class.

5. Edit the HelloBean class and change the foo method to

 public String sayHello(String param) {

return "Hello..";

The XDoclet builder will start working again and update our classes. At the end
our projects will look like:
The highlighted classes HelloBean.java and HelloSession.java are server side classes and
Hello.java and HelloHome.java are public interfaces. These are the classes that will be
needed by all clients.

· Deploying the Session Bean

1. Open the Servers view (Windows -> Show View -> Servers)

2. Create a new server by right-clicking inside the “Servers” view.

3. Choose SimpleEJBTutorial from the available projects.

Ensure that the option “Automatically publish when starting server” is checked.
4. Look for console messages such as:

22:02:13,274 INFO [EjbModule] Deploying Hello

22:02:13,556 INFO [EJBDeployer] Deployed: file:/E:/jboss-

4.0.2/server/default/deploy/SimpleEJBTutorial.jar
 Now the EJB has been defined and deployed. It is ready to be used. We can now
build a client to make the HelloBean say Hello.

· Creating a Web client Application

1. Create a new Dynamic Web Project namely “HelloWeb” from the Project
Explorer (Dynamic Web Projects -> New -> Dynamic Web Project)
 We will need to access the EJB interface types such as Hello and HelloHome in
client applications.

These classes are required to be added in the build path.

2. In the Project Explorer, right click on the HelloWeb dynamic web project and
Choose Properties...
3. In the Java buildpath, add the SimpleEJBTutorial project to the project references.
This will help allows us to compile against the latest ejb client classes in this web
project.
4. Create a new “test.jsp” under the HelloWebWebContent directory.
 5. Open test.jsp in the JSP source page editor.
6. Add the following lines in the “body” of test.jsp

<%

com.tutorial.Hello hello = null;

try{

com.tutorial.HelloHome home = com.tutorial.HelloUtil.getHome();

hello = home.create();
 }catch(Exception exception)

%>

<b><%= hello.sayHello(" my friend !") %></b>

 7. Save the test.jsp. Our web application is now complete.

· Deploying and running the Web client Application

1. Right click on test.jsp and select Run As -> Run on Server...

2. Look for something like: [TomcatDeployer] deploy, ctxPath=/HelloWeb,

warUrl=file:/E:/jboss-4.0.2/server/default/tmp/deploy/tmp52097HelloWeb-
exp.war/ on the console.
3. Same application can be invoked from browser using the url,
http://localhost:8080/HelloWeb/test.jsp
4. Experiment adding more methods and ejbs.

Conclusion
In this tutorial we learned how to configure Eclipse to work with XDoclet and create
a J2EE EJB project that has a Session Bean. We created a client Web application. This
application, while simple, provides a good introduction to EJB development and
some of the Web development tools available.