Developing, Deploying, Verifying, and Migrating J2EE Applications
to be Used on the Sun ONE Application Server

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The following technical article may contain actual software programs in source code form. This source code is made available for developers to use as needed, pursuant to the terms and conditions of this license.

This article consists of the following parts:

1. Introduction and Architecture of the Sample Application
2. Deploying the Application on the J2EE Reference Implemenation
3. Testing the Application for J2EE Software Compliance With the Java Application Verification Kit for the Enterprise
4. Migrating the Application With the Sun ONE Migration Tool for Application Servers
5. Developing the Application on Sun ONE Studio 4 Software

Introduction and Architecture of the Sample Application

In this five-part article, you will learn how easy it is to develop, deploy, and verify a complete Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE platform) application. The article demonstrates these processes using downloadable source code from a working J2EE application that incorporates both web and server components. Using the source code for this application, you learn how to verify that the application is J2EE software compliant and how to migrate the application so that it can be run on the Sun ONE Application Server. You also learn how to develop the application "from scratch" using Sun's integrated development environment, Sun ONE Studio 4 developer tools.

Part 1 of this article describes the components and architecture of the sample application that is used throughout the demonstration. The Java Application Verification Kit (AVK) for the Enterprise, the tool for verifying that an application will be portable across all J2EE-compliant implementations, requires that the application being verified first be deployed on the J2EE Reference Implementation. Part 2 lists the steps necessary to deploy the source code provided on the J2EE Reference Implementation. Part 3 describes how to run the Java AVK for the Enterprise to verify that the application is J2EE compliant. Part 4 shows you how to migrate the application that you deployed on the J2EE Reference Implementation in Part 2, so that you can run it on Sun ONE Application Server 7.0. The tool you use in this section is the Sun ONE Migration Tool for Application Servers. In Parts 1-4, you use source code that is already developed and is provided to you. In Part 5, you learn how to use Sun ONE Studio 4 developer tools to develop the source code for the application.

The parts of this article are loosly tied together, but can be read independently. Read the article in its entirety to gain a complete understanding of the process, or choose which parts to read according to your needs.

To benefit the most from this article, you should follow along with the step-by-step instructions. To do this, you will need the following Sun products:

• J2EE Reference Implementation version 1.3.x, also known as the Java 2 SDK, Enterprise Edition - available free from http://java.sun.com/j2ee/sdk_1.3/index.html
• Java Application Verification Kit for the Enterprise - a trial version is available free from http://java.sun.com/j2ee/verified/tryandbuy.html
• Sun ONE Migration Tool for Application Servers version 3.0 - available free from http://www.sun.com/migration/sunonetools.html
• Sun ONE Application Server 7.0 - the Standard Edition is available free for evaluation from http://wwws.sun.com/software/products/appsrvr/appsrvr_download.html. Choose a download that includes an evaluation copy of Sun ONE Studio 4, Enterprise Edition.
• Sun ONE Studio 4, Enterprise Edition - included with the Sun ONE Application Server evaluation product, or download a free evaluation copy separately from http://wwws.sun.com/software/sundev/jde/buy/index.html

All of these products are available both for the Solaris Operating System (OS) and for Microsoft Windows. While the steps listed in this article assume that you are running on the Solaris OS, they can be easily modified to be used with Microsoft Windows.

Architecture of the Sample Application

The sample application included with this article is called the StockGrant application. You can download the source files for the complete StockGrant application as a .zip file. The StockGrant application is extended from the application in the J2EE Tutorial, Developing Enterprise Applications Using the J2EE Platform, written by Monica Pawlan in June 2000.

The StockGrant application uses a web-based user interface that is intended to be used by an employee's manager to grant that employee stock options. The employee's manager is the user of this application.

When running this application, the user inputs an employee number and a stock multiplier. "Behind the scenes", the application's business logic determines the amount of stock to give to the employee, puts that information into a relational database, verifies to the user that the transaction was completed by sending text to the user's browser screen and to a log file, and sends an email verification to the user.

Take a look at the architecture diagram:

In the architecture diagram, you can see that once the user inputs the data from a browser, the StockProcessor servlet takes over. The StockProcessor servlet does the following:

1. Accepts the employee number and the stock multiplier, and calls a session bean, StockProcessorBean, to do the business logic of calculating the amount of stock to grant to the employee.
2. Calls an entity bean, StockBean, to perform the container managed persistence (CMP) which saves the employee number and the stock details in the relational database. Database products are bundled with the J2EE Reference Implementation and with the Sun ONE Application Server, and these bundled database products are used with the StockGrant application.
3. Acts as a Java Message Service (JMS) client and sends the stock grant messages to the message-driven bean, StockMessageBean. The StockMessageBean receives the text message and sends it to the user's browser screen and to the log file, and uses the JavaMail API to send the text as an email message to the user.

Please continue with Part 2 to learn how to deploy the StockGrant application on the J2EE Reference Implementation so that you can run the Java Application Verification Kit for the Enterprise to ensure that the application is portable to other J2EE implementations, as described in Part 3. Then, continue with Part 4 to learn how to migrate the application so that it can be run on the Sun ONE Application Server.

Alternatively, you can start with Part 5 to see how to develop this application "from scratch" using Sun ONE Studio 4 developer tools, so that it can be run on the Sun ONE Application Server.