There are many articles and tutorials out there that discuss how to use the individual technologies in Java EE 6, e.g., JSF 2, EJB 3.1, JPA, etc, to develop an application, but I haven’t seen one that puts together the said technologies and showcases them in one tutorial with an end-to-end demonstration. As such, I thought I would create one here for the benefit of those who are new to JEE6 and NetBeans IDE 6.8 and those who are seriously looking at NetBeans IDE 6.8 as a tool for developing their enterprise applications.
This article published on Netbeans Zone aims to provide detailed steps to develop a web-based application based on technologies in the JEE6 specs, i.e., JavaServer Faces 2.0 (JSF), Enterprise Java Beans 3.1 (Session Bean and Message-Driven Bean) and Java Persistence API (JPA) with the help of NetBeans IDE 6.8 as the development & deployment tool. The example in this tutorial creates a web application called “CustomerApp” that performs only the Retrieve and Update functions of CRUD on the customer records provided by the NetBeans Sample database served by the Glassfish built-in database server, JavaDB (Derby). In addition to the above-mentioned technologies from JEE6, PrimeFaces for JSF2 will also be used as the Ajax-based Framework for the Web UI portion which is lacking in the stack. So, this tutorial also discusses how PrimeFaces can be integrated into NetBeans IDE and to enable Ajax capabilities for Web projects.
The objective of the tutorial is to demonstrate the ease of using the various JEE6 technologies and putting them together to create an enterprise-ready web-based application. Although the application is developed for demo purposes, its architecture represents the best practices in developing an enterprise application, whereby modularity, scalability, and reusability are taken into consideration.