Java EE 5 Design Time Support via WTP and Eclipse: What it Means for You Part 2
In yesterday’s blog Java EE 5 Design Time Support via WTP and Eclipse: What it Means for You (Part 1 of 2) I told you about all the nifty new wizards we created for working with Java EE 5 and the Web Tools Platform (WTP) in the SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment. Today I’m going to dive into the new Java EE 5 models that we’ve created to help you with annotations and tagging.
Java EE 5 Models
New Java EE 5 projects require new models. Because at the end of the day you may end up with dozens of EJBs, and if you rely on the good old style of just expanding your projects and going through your Java glossaries you’re going to be lost.
That’s why we created a new model. The model is now a merged view of the meta information for both the XML deployment descriptor and the Java Annotations in the source code. And this results in deployment descriptor trees that are available in the project explorer view.
The EJB 3.0 model lets you see all well known artifacts for Session, Message Drive and Entity beans. The “deployment descriptor” sub-tree also reveals details about the business interfaces, service end points, “old style” home and remote interfaces, etc.
Note the new artifacts in the model tree graphic below, for example: EJB 3.0 Business interfaces, and Web service endpoint interfaces.
The WEB 2.5 model we have created lets you see almost all of the major artifacts that you normally see in WEB 2.4 projects. This includes Servlets, Filters, Listeners and Mappings. When you open and explore your project you have a note that will say “deployment descriptor.” Under this note all of your servlet filters, listeners, and the mappings between them will be listed as separate subnotes. This makes it much easier to navigate between components and open them.
There is a new model for the Enterprise Application 5 projects, as well. You can still see the Web and EJB projects included in this EAR project. There is now a feature in the Java EE 5 specification, called Bundled Libraries and it is presented visually as part of the tree.
Annotation Support
The annotation support that exists is Eclipse is not all that user-friendly. We figured you might want to customize what you’ve generated. That’s why we clarified the annotation templates for all the Java EE 5 annotation types with some default values where applicable. A list of annotations permitted for your current selection (class, method or field) is available via the QuickFix, or outline view’s context menu. This can be used to define your transaction properties, define relationships, inject references or to just change your mind at some point and say I want this to be an entity instead of a class.
Tag Libraries
The tag library is also new. We’ve developed wizards and graphical editors for developing tag library definitions. A typical tag library contains lots of tag files and tags with attributes, and variables. One can also define a validator, listeners and functions. But you would have to look through that XML file to locate a pack definition. The graphical editor gives you a convenient way to locate elements in the XML file, update them and add new tags, as you can see in this screenshot.
Application Server
And of course we also have integration with the SAP NetWeaver Application Server, Java EE 5 edition. There are many benefits of using the SAP NetWeaver Application Server, apart from the fact that it’s Java EE 5 certified and compliant. For example: You can enable, disable, and debug, without restarting the server. This saves time and allows the debugging to take place without interrupting product requests.
Wait, There’s More!
There are other features that we’ve incorporated worth mentioning:
- Import and export of Java EE 5 projects.
- Migration of older J2EE projects to Java EE 5 – directly from the J2EE perspective.
- XML templates for the Java EE 5 deployment descriptors
You can learn more about all of these features, and the SAP NetWeaver Application Server, at the 2007 JavaOne Conference next week. Stop by our booth (#634) for a demo of the new features in SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio and meet with our experts.
