Agile Java EE 7 Development with WebSphere Liberty Profile 8.5

Days 1 and 2: Introduction to the JEE 7 specification and agile development tooling

• A brief history of the Java EE platform.
• JEE 6 fundamentals: profiles, different profile types and EJB Lite.
• New features in the JEE 7 specification.
• Introduction to agile development tools for the labs:
  • Docker container fundamentals.
  • The Git source control tool.
  • The JUnit testing framework: use and main assertions, including assertNull and assertTrue.
  • The Maven 3 build tool and a review of its implementation.
  • The JEE 7 WAS 8.5 and WAS Liberty Profile 8.5 server platforms.
• Development environment installation practice: configuring Eclipse and JDK 8, installing Maven and reviewing its use, integrating and configuring the WebSphere Liberty 8.5 application server, starting and stopping it, and other operations.
• Introduction to and review of web architecture fundamentals: JSP and Servlets 3.0, including deployment facilities, annotations, dynamic servlet and filter registration, and packaged resources.
• Servlets 3.0 practice and initial deployments on WebSphere Liberty Profile.
• Advanced Servlets 3.0 concepts: asynchronous processing support, advanced security aspects and other topics.
• Practice implementing advanced servlet features with a chat application and deployment on WebSphere Liberty Profile.
• CDI or Dependency Injection (JSR 299): fundamentals, basic injection, qualifiers, stateful objects and the @inject and @Qualifier annotations.
• Advanced CDI with producer methods.
• Practice implementing CDI and deploying on WebSphere Liberty Profile.
• REST web services and RESTful architecture.

Quiz to validate the skills acquired over these two days.

Day 3: Introduction to and getting started with JSF 2.2 and WebSocket

• Review of JavaServer Faces specification fundamentals.
• Templating with Facelets.
• Composite components.
• Navigation rules and Faces Flow.
• Managed Beans.
• Input/output tags.
• Value binding expressions.
• Form submission.
• Flash scope, or short-lived scope.
• Data validation.
• Ajax and JSF.
• JSF 2.2 new features and HTML 5 support.
• Introduction to the PrimeFaces JSF component library.
• Practice with PrimeFaces to implement the concepts studied, configure the framework in Maven/Eclipse and deploy projects to WebSphere Liberty Profile using agile tooling.
• Introduction to the Java API for WebSocket (JSR 356).
• WebSocket support in JEE 7: programming model, data types, endpoint configuration, encoding and decoding.
• WebSocket practice.

Quiz to conclude a full day on JSF 2.2 and WebSocket.

Day 4: EJB 3.1 and advanced transaction management

• Introduction to the Enterprise JavaBeans component model (JSR 345).
• Session Beans and Message-Driven Beans.
• Event callbacks: @PostConstruct, @PostActivate, @PreDestroy and others.
• New features in EJB 3.1 and 3.2: WAR packaging, Singleton, Timer Service, asynchronous calls, life cycle event callbacks, embedded container, optional local interfaces and annotations.
• The EJB 3.2 Lite profile as a subset of the full EJB 3 API.
• Labs applying the concepts studied.
• Java Transaction API (JTA, JSR 907).
• New features in JTA 1.2.
• Lab implementing the @Transactional annotation.
• Java Persistence API, JPA 2.1 (JSR 338): review of fundamentals and mapping.
• Persistence Unit, Persistence Context and Entity Manager.
• Introduction to JPQL.
• Advanced JPA: Criteria API and stored procedures.
• Application and implementation labs: generating JPA entities and DAO data access objects with a JSF frontend using PrimeFaces.

Quiz on fundamental EJB and JPA specification concepts.

Day 5: Implementing a JEE 7 case study and final deployment on the WebSphere Liberty Profile 8.5 application server

The final day applies and validates all the concepts studied through a case study centred on JSF 2.2 architecture with:

• PrimeFaces for the presentation layer.
• EJB 3.2 for the backend.
• JPA for persistence.
• Postgres for the database.
• Final deployment on WebSphere Liberty Profile 8.5 using the agile tooling introduced at the beginning of the course.