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Last weekend while pondering the question "Is Scala ready for the enterprise?" I decided to write a simple Java EE 6 app entirely in Scala, without using any Java. I had three main reasons for doing this: one was just to see how easy/difficult it would be to write everything in Scala (it was easy).  Another was to document the process for others journeying down the same road (the entire project is on github).  Finally, I wanted to identify advantages of using Scala instead of Java that are specific to Java EE apps (I found several). Background The specific app I created was an adaptation of the Books example from Chapter 10 of Beginning Java™ EE 6 Platform with GlassFish™ 3. It's a simple web app that displays a list of books in a database and lets you add new books. Although it's a pretty trivial app, it does touch on several important Java EE 6 technologies: JPA 2.0, EJB 3.1 and JSF 2.0.

I am working on a web site that will help students practice their Scala programming skills. As I labored along, writing my JSF app code, I thought "this is silly-why not practice Scala at the same time?" But I like JSF and wasn't ready to jump to Lift or Vaadin. With Eclipse, this isn't all that hard. Install the Java plugin. Make a dynamic web project in the usual way, using the Java EE perspective. Then, switch to the Scala perspective, right-click on the project, and, if all planets are aligned correctly, you will get a menu item "Add Scala nature". (If they are not, see here for a manual approach.) Add your managed beans as Scala classes. Finally, switch back to the Java EE perspective, select the project properties, and add the Scala library JAR as a Java EE module dependency. But I like NetBeans and wasn't ready to switch to Eclipse. (Unfortunately, JSF 2 support in Eclipse is pretty minimal, the Glassfish integration is a bit flaky, and the Scala plugin has very little usable code completion.) NetBeans doesn't let me add a "Scala nature" to a web project. If I add Scala files to the project, I can edit them with the Scala editor, but they just get copied to the WAR file, without any compilation. I had one look at the Ant scripts for a Scala and a web project and decided that I wasn't going to figure out how to merge them. This blog shows how you can use Maven to make a mixed Scala/Java project in NetBeans. So I gathered up JSF and Scala pom.xml files from here and here, cut out the considerable crud from the JSF POM file that was probably meant for supporting Tomcat, and merged the results to the best of my ability-see below. You use the usual Maven directory structure, but with a src/main/scala directory instead of src/main/java:

"Eclipse BIRT is free / open source reporting engine for Java. A commercial BIRT Report Server is available from Actuate (the company behind Eclipse BIRT). While Eclipse BIRT does not provide a free/open source reporting server, the BIRT Runtime provides a simple Eclipse BIRT Web Viewer. Eclipse BIRT Web Viewer installation instructions for several Java EE application servers are here. Here I share my own experience installing Eclipse BIRT 2.6.1 Web Viewer under GlassFish 3.0.1 Java EE Application Server :"

Welcome to the community home for Pentaho Data Integration Community Edition (PDI CE) also known as Kettle. Pentaho Data Integration delivers powerful Extraction, Transformation and Loading (ETL) capabilities using an innovative, metadata-driven approach. With an intuitive, graphical, drag and drop design environment, and a proven, scalable, standards-based architecture, Pentaho Data Integration is increasingly the choice for organizations over traditional, proprietary ETL or data integration tools. Community Edition is self supported open source software. An Enterprise Edition (EE) of Pentaho Data Integration including technical support, managed upgrades and enterprise features is also available. For more information about EE or for screenshots and datasheets, visit Pentaho Data Integration EE on Pentaho's corporate site.

Vaadin is a Rapid Application Development (RAD) framework for RIA applications. I only know it for a few months but since I started experimenting with it, I'm really in favor of it. I see a lot of advantages compared to Sun's Java EE standard front-end framework JSF. First of all Vaadin is a java library, so you only have to write Java to build a complete frontend. No need for a specific frontend language, no need for converters (for comboboxes),… This also implies that you can use the full Java power on the frontend side and that's an huge advantage because frontend code is now type-safe and easily refactorable. You can unit test your frontend with JUnit. You can also use all existing java libraries on the frontend side, for example LOG4J. Another advantage is the fact that Vaadin is easy to learn (JSF isn't!) and to use: it's straigtforward. It feels like developing desktop apps and for me developing desktop apps feels much more intuitive than developing web-apps the way I'm used to. Vaadin uses convention over configuration. No need to register new components, validators or whatever in different xml files. Themes have a default folder and a default folder structure. Vaadin is very well documented. There's the book of Vaadin wich explains every aspect of the framework very clear. On the site there's a blog, a FAQ section, a wiki, a forum, examples with Java source code, … It's very easy to extend. Want to create your own Validator? Just implement an interface or extend another Validator and use it. Want to create your own custom server side component? Just extend the CustomComponent class or extend from another component. There's also an add-on directory where you can download UI components, data components, tools, themes, …

"The goal of JavaMelody is to monitor Java or Java EE applications servers in QA and production environments. It is not a tool to simulate requests from users, it is a tool to measure and calculate statistics on real operation of an application depending on the usage of the application by users. JavaMelody is opensource (LGPL) and production ready: in production in an application of 25 person years. JavaMelody is easy to integrate in most applications and is lightweight (no profiling and no database). JavaMelody is mainly based on statistics of requests and on evolution charts. "

"Libra is an open source project under the Eclipse Web Tools Platform Container Project. It provides standard tools for OSGi Enterprise application development and in particular tools that integrate the existing WTP and PDE tooling so that OSGi Enterprise applications can be developed with both tooling at the same time. Libra also will enable users to work with tools for better experience in the Server-Side Equinox scenario. The goals of the project are: Providing tools for creation of deployable artifacts for application servers implementing the OSGi Enterprise specification, e.g. wizard for creating new Web Application Bundle projects. Providing tools for converting existing Java EE deployable artifacts to OSGi Enterprise deployable artifacts, e.g. wizard for converting Dynamic Web projects to a Web Application Bundle projects. Contributing tools for editing and validation of the metadata of OSGi Enterprise artifacts, e.g. extension of the PDE Manifest Editor for editing manifest headers that are specific to Web Application Bundles. Developing OSGi server adapter, providing basic implementation of configuring an OSGi-based application server, starting it and deploying OSGi enterprise artifacts. This server adapter should be customizable and extensible by adopters. Delivering tools that improve the experience of developing Server-Side Equinox applications. Extending the tools in scope, so adopters can apply them depending on their own application model."

"The Frisbee module was developed as a "bag" of STK paragraphs with one common factor: social. These are the main features: CE / EE pure STK-based module drop-n-run module, with a self explaining demo website detailed instructions on module install one new Magnolia theme, frisbee, simple and clean Google Map (v3) integration . single marker map . multiple marker map, 2 demo marker-retrieval modelClass Flickr Slideshow, with custom query builder (tags, full-text search, author based search..) Facebook integration . Facebook SDK . Facebook iLike button . Facebook meta tag, reading values from page properties ShareThis and AddThis integration Twitter integration (you need Twitter4J.jar) . last tweet paragraph . last n tweets paragraphs . TweetThis button . ReTweet button Frisbee is at 1.0.0 stable version, but it is not ended here, it is open for future developments and integrations. Feel free to download it and to provide comments / contributions."

JDBC realm has a lot of attention in recent months. This blog summarizes the evolution of the JDBC realm implementation in GlassFish and explains how the latest implementation works. I would like to thank Jean-Baptiste, and Richter for their contributions and comments. The participation from the open source community definitely helps everyone. I encourage all of you to give feedback, participate, and help evolve this feature further. GlassFish always had the capability for anyone to plug-in a realm. Implementing a custom realm in the Sun Java System Application Server EE 8.0 is described in the article Authentication Using Custom Realms in Sun Java System Application Server. In S1AS 7.x, there is a JDBC Realm bundled in sample. Jean-Baptiste formally filed an enhancement and provided a clear text version of JDBCRealm for GlassFish. Richter wrote another implementation because the GlassFish JDBCRealm at that time not compatible with Tomcat.

"This chapter introduces the Expression Language (also referred to as the EL), which provides an important mechanism for enabling the presentation layer (web pages) to communicate with the application logic (backing beans). The EL is used by both JavaServer Faces technology and JavaServer Pages (JSP) technology. The EL represents a union of the expression languages offered by JavaServer Faces technology and JSP technology."

JSF 2.0, CDI, Scala 2.8 using Eclipse, Maven and Tomcat Tools used: * JDK 1.6 * Maven 2.2.1 * Eclipse 3.5 * Eclipse Scala plugin (I am using nightly build - http://www.scala-lang.org/scala-eclipse-plugin-nightly) * m2eclipse plugin Download the source from here