Through this tutorial, you used Workshop for WebLogic to build a very simple
application that uses Enterprise JavaBeans to model the parts of a visitor
tracking application. You also created a page flow to use as a test client.
Concepts and Tasks Introduced in This Tutorial
- In Workshop for WebLogic, EJB source code is contained in a single JAVA
file. Supporting files, such as those for implemented EJB interfaces, are
generated for you at build time based on the annotations you use in source
code.
- When developing EJBs you annotate source code to specify the details for
automatically generated source artifacts. For example, the
@FileGeneration
annotation's attributes specify whether to generate files, as well as the
names of generated files.
- Some source code annotations are used at build time to generate values
for deployment descriptors. For example, the
@Entity annotation's
primKeyClass attribute value is used in the <prim-key-class>
element of the bean's deployment descriptor.
- Most annotations in EJB source code are defined by the WebLogic Server
EJBGen tool. This tool is invoked at build time to process your annotations.
Note that you do not need to separately run EJBGen on your Workshop for
WebLogic source code. For more information on EJBGen, see EJBGen
Reference on eDocs.
- An EAR project is a special kind of project through which you can generate
a single Enterprise ARchive file that contains the outputs of multiple projects
— such as projects whose outputs make up a single application. Use
an EAR project to represent your application as a whole.
- You can use EAR project library modules to collect classpath
dependencies that are shared across development artifacts. In this way,
you needn't copy the same JAR files into the project hierarchy of each project.
- The EJB control is a handy way to invoke EJBs from within client code.
The EJB control handles typical EJB client plumbing by virtue of your specifying
annotation values that indicate which EJB the control represents.
- A good way to test EJBs as you develop is to use a page flow as a test
client. You can create an EJB control that represents your EJB, then call
control methods within your page flow code. For more information about page
flows, see Page
Flow Overview at the Apache Beehive web site.
- The "Workshop" IDE perspective provides an easy way to display
the IDE views you'll likely want when developing application components.
