Creating a Minimal Enterprise Application with Maven

Setting up a Java EE application is no trivial task. Dependency management, building, and deployment can get pretty complex and require a thorough understanding of deployment descriptors, jars, ears and other artifacts.
In this article, I’m going to present a truly minimal maven-based setup for the JBoss Application Server (tested with jboss-4.0.5.GA), providing a solid base [...]

Using the Maven Source Plugin

When using an ordinary jar library, IDEs like Eclipse’s JDE don’t have enough information to display inline javadocs for referenced classes. You have to manually direct Eclipse to the library’s source code to take advantage of inline documentation. Maven’s source plugin provides a convenient solution to this problem. When building the library, the plugin creates [...]

Generating DDL Scripts with Maven

Java’s persistence API (JPA) makes object-relational mapping very convenient. Using Hibernate, tables and sequences are generated automatically which speeds up development significantly. However, in production systems automatic schema creation isn’t desired. In many cases you would want to tune the schema a bit, like adding an index for speeding up common access paths, renaming constraints [...]

Bookmarkable Pages with JSF

In many applications it is a requirement to link to pages that accept arguments via HTTP-GET parameters. Over the last few months I’ve been working with Seam quite a bit, where it is pretty easy to create bookmarkable pages. In fact, this use case is so common that it is discussed in the introductory chapter [...]

Quick Java Project Setup Using Maven

Java projects, especially when it comes to web or EJB applications, tend to get pretty complex. Setting up such a project is a non-trivial task because of the many conventions you have to follow to make your application deployable. The maven project management tool provides a mechanism to setup a project quickly using its archetype [...]