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Kick-start your Java apps, Part 1: Free software, fast development

Sing Li (westmakaha@yahoo.com), Author, Wrox Press
Photo of Sing Li
Sing is a consultant and an active author with over two decades of industry experience. He has contributed to Beginning JavaServer Pages, Professional Apache Tomcat 5, Pro JSP - Third Edition, Early Adopter JXTA, Professional Jini, Beginning J2ME: From Novice to Professional, Third Edition , and numerous other books. Sing also writes for technical magazines and participates in open source communities. He is an evangelist of the open source, VOIP, and P2P movements. You can reach Sing at westmakaha@yahoo.com.

Summary:  To create, test, and deploy a Web-based application or Web service rapidly, you need a proven relational database, a standards-compliant Web application server, and a flexible IDE. Ideally, all these software packages are production-tested, simple to obtain, easy to use, and well integrated with one another. This tutorial shows you how to use IBM-backed open source and free software to kick-start your Java™ Web-based application development. You'll learn exactly where to download such components, install them, and get them working for you today.

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Date:  05 Dec 2007 (Published 27 Feb 2006)
Level:  Intermediate
PDF:  A4 and Letter (3104 KB | 69 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®

Activity:  24607 views
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Before you start

Combine the proven power of the industrial-strength DB2® database with the versatility of the Java EE 5 compatible WebSphere® Application Server, then throw in the popular open source Eclipse IDE — and you can have a highly productive environment to create, test, and deploy Web-based applications and Web services.

This is not a secret, and professionals in large IT projects have been enjoying this proven collection of software for years. But until recently, the development community at large has not had general access to these tools. Times have changed, though, and today full-featured editions of the servers and IDE in this collection are only a download away — free of charge and free of license fees — with full support from IBM.

Java developers can now freely use the open source Eclipse IDE to create and test applications and Web services and then install them to WebSphere Application Server Community Edition 2.0 (referred to throughout this tutorial as Application Server), and DB2 Express-C 9.5 for production deployment.

About this tutorial

The Kick-start combo

With the Kick-start your Java apps suite, IBM has put together a powerful combination of freely available software components for data, deployment, and development:

  • DB2 Express-C 9.5 database server
  • WebSphere Application Server Community Edition 2.0
  • The Eclipse IDE

You're not locked in to using these packages in combination; each works with a variety of other open-standards based components. You can use Eclipse with other (even non-Java) application servers and other databases. Application Server doesn't require either DB2 Express-C 9.5 or Eclipse. And DB2 Express-C 9.5 can fit into development and deployment environments other than Eclipse and Application Server. But, in ways you'll understand fully from this tutorial, using the whole, tightly integrated suite can gain you a wealth of advantages.

This tutorial takes you along the shortest path to getting these software components — called the Kick-start your Java apps suite — downloaded and working, letting you discover their infinite possibilities while creating your next programming masterpiece. It assists you in installing and setting up the components and reveals how they are designed to work with one another. Toward this goal, the tutorial does not attempt to cover all possible features or configuration options available for the individual packages. You'll be able to discover each product's rich feature set at your own pace as you continue exploration and development.

This tutorial guides you through:

  • Downloading and installing DB2 Express-C 9.5
  • Creating databases and manipulating data with tools in DB2 Express-C 9.5
  • Downloading and installing Application Server 2.0
  • Managing Application Server through the Web console
  • Connecting Application Server to DB2 Express-C 9.5 using a JCA 1.5 connector
  • Downloading and installing Eclipse
  • Installing the Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) server adapter for Application Server (formerly called the Application Server plug-in for Eclipse)
  • Managing, browsing, and editing DB2 Express-C 9.5 data through the Eclipse IDE
  • Testing Web applications in Eclipse using existing Application Server installation
  • Rapidly developing and testing a JSP/JSTL Web application in Eclipse, with data access to DB2 Express-C 9.5, and deploying it to Application Server
  • Configuring Application Server as a general Web server on the Internet

By the end of the tutorial, you'll have hands-on working experience with all the software tools and have a simple data-driven Java application deployed on Application Server.

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Prerequisites

You should be familiar with Java development in general and server-side Java development specifically. This tutorial assumes that you understand the general operations of a relational database and are familiar with basic Java EE concepts, such as deployment descriptors and WAR archives. Experience working with an application server and relational database is beneficial but not mandatory.

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System requirements

To follow along and try out the code for this tutorial, you need a working installation of Sun's Java SE JDK 5 update 15 or the IBM SDK for Java Version 5 SR6.

The recommended system configuration for trying out the tutorial is:

  • A system supporting the JDK/JRE listed above with at least 1GB of main memory (2GB recommended)
  • At least 2GB of disk space to install the software components and examples

The instructions in the tutorial are based on a Windows™ operating system. All of the tools covered in the tutorial also work on Linux® and UNIX® systems.

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