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Kick-start your Java apps, Part 2: Easy, lightweight Ajax development

Build an interactive Web application with the Kick-start your Java apps suite

Sing Li (westmakaha@yahoo.com), Author, Wrox Press

Sing Li is the author of Professional Apache Tomcat, Early Adopter JXTA,, and Professional Jini, as well as numerous other books with Wrox Press. He is a regular contributor to technical magazines and is an active evangelist of the P2P evolution. Sing is a consultant and freelance writer and can be reached at westmakaha@yahoo.com.

Summary: The combination of Eclipse, DB2® Express-C 9.5, and WebSphere® Application Server Community Edition 2.0 — all free to download, use, and deploy — is an excellent from-prototype-to-production suite for all of your Java™ and Java enterprise development needs. What might not be obvious is the relative ease with which you can use these proven tools to create, test, and deploy cutting-edge, lightweight applications as well. This tutorial guides you through the development of a small human-resources application, first using conventional JavaServer Pages (JSP) based technology, and then migrating it to a highly interactive solution using Ajax.

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Date: 05 Dec 2007 (Published 18 Apr 2006)
Level: Intermediate
PDF: A4 and Letter (1782 KB | 53 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®

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Before you start

The needs of Java EE application and Web services developers are well served by the tight integration among the free tools that make up the Kick-start your Java apps suite: Eclipse, DB2 Express-C 9.5, and WebSphere Application Server Community Edition 2.0 (Application Server). The companion tutorial to this one, Kick-start your Java apps, Part 1: Free software, fast development, covers how well these tools work together for Java EE software development.

Increasingly, Java developers are experimenting with highly interactive Web-based user interfaces, including alternatives that don't require the use of a conventional Java EE container. Such exploration often forces you to learn an unproven programming language, work with beta-quality tooling, and gamble on deployment technology that hasn't withstood the test of time.

It might surprise you to learn that the production-grade, robust set of free IBM-backed tools that you use for your Java EE development tasks can also be your best buddy in exploring the realm of alternative user-interface development. The great news is that all your code — lightweight or conventional — can take advantage of the rich, easy-to-use feature set of Eclipse, the maturity and robustness of DB2-Express C, and the world-class deployment support of Application Server.

This tutorial shows you how to move an application from a conventional design to one based on Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) technology — all within the friendly and familiar environment of the Kick-start your Java apps suite.

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 access, application 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.

About this tutorial

You'll start this tutorial by creating an employee-information panel using standard JSP and servlet technology. You'll do all development and testing using the Kick-start your Java apps suite. You'll design the application in Eclipse and then deploy and test it on Application Server. The application interactively fetches and displays employee information, including a photo, from a DB2 Express-C 9.5 database.

Then the tutorial discusses some of the limitations of the JSP application design and shows how a lightweight Ajax-based solution can help to overcome them. It introduces basic Ajax concepts and a popular Java toolkit called Direct Web Remoting (DWR) (see Resources). You'll convert the application to a lightweight design. The redesigned application resides within an HTML page hosted on Application Server acting as a simple Web server, accessing DB2 Express C database information directly using Ajax and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) serialization.

The tutorial guides you through:

Developing an employee-information panel using conventional JSP and servlet technologies
Handling the display of GIF photos from DB2 binary large object (BLOB) fields using a custom servlet
Being introduced to Ajax and Direct Web Remoting
Migrating the employee-information panel to a lightweight Ajax design
Coding the Java-side support code for the new application
JavaScript coding using the DWR utilities library
Testing the new interactive employee-information panel

By the end of the tutorial, you'll appreciate some of the fundamental differences between conventional Java EE application design and the highly interactive Ajax-based approach. You'll also become comfortable with using the Kick-start your Java apps suite to explore present and future Java-based development frameworks.

Prerequisites

You should be familiar with Java development in general and server-side Java development specifically. This tutorial assumes you are familiar with basic Java EE deployment concepts, such as deployment descriptors and WAR archives. You should also be familiar with JSP programming and using tag libraries, such as the JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library (JSTL). This tutorial assumes that you understand the general operations of a relational database and have programmed JDBC applications. It also assumes that you have completed the Kick-start your Java apps: Free software, fast development tutorial.

System requirements

To follow along and try out the code, you need working installations of:

Sun's Java SE JDK 5 update 15 or the IBM SDK for Java Version 5 SR6 or later.
The Kick-start your Java apps suite:
- DB2 Express-C 9.5
- Application Server version 2.0.0.1
- Eclipse 3.3 and the WTP Server Adapter for Application Server V. 2.0
For a proper configuration, you should follow the detailed download and installation instructions for these components in the relevant sections of Kick-start your Java apps: Free software, fast development.
The employee-listing application you built in Kick-start your Java apps: Free software, fast development.
The DB2 Express-C 9.5 sample database.
DWR. Detailed instructions for experimenting with DWR are included in this tutorial.

The recommended system hardware configuration for trying out the tutorial:

A system supporting the JDK/JRE listed above with at least 1GB of main memory (2GB recommended).
At least 10MB of additional free 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 and techniques covered in the tutorial also work on Linux® and Unix® systems.

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