Architecture of a Java EE web application - java

I want to realize the following scenario:
The frontend is based on HTML5 / CSS3 / JavaScript (with a JavaScript framework like ExtJS or jQuery). I have full HTML pages with forms, buttons, text fields, which have submit buttons which should send the data to the webserver. On the other hand I also have a website in this web application which get/send the data via a JSON webservice.
The backend should be realized with Java EE (MySQL database, Hibernate as ORM, ...). But which basic technology should I use? JavaServer Faces? Or JavaServer Pages?
What is the best method to handle JSON and HTTP GET/POST requests?
Thank you in advance & Best Regards.

Take a look at Play Framework, which has excellent JSON support, built-in JPA support and jQuery included.

Spring MVC has a very good support for rendering JSON responses and REST-like URLs. So you can use it for both your standard views and your JSON responses.
RESTEasy is a REST framework by JBoss. With it you can use anything - JSF, Wicket, etc.
Be careful not to duplicate code. Whatever solution you choose, move the code into services, and consume them from the json and regular response renderers.

Related

Migrating Spring MVC application from JSP to AngularJS

I am considering moving from server-side rendering view technologies like JSP, Struts to client-side rendering view technologies using AngularJS,
A popular Javascript framework for modern browsers.
When we are making this change and what are all the things that I may encounter.
If anybody who are experienced in Spring Web MVC and JSP development and would know how Spring MVC can work together with a client-side Javascript like AngularJS.
Kindly Answer.
You have to rewrite the view part using angularJS, and replace the logic from the server with a REST API.
It's often a huge work, and the hardest part is to migrate the existing server-side session management to the browser, because a REST API is stateless.
Below is one of the suggested way in which i recently migrated my existing spring MVC web-application in Single page application using AngularJs as client side java-script framework:
1).First you needs to bisect your core business logic which must needs to handle in DB layer,if not done already. i.e. SP's,trigger's,etc...
2).Then for the thing mentioned as hardest by Toilal ("to migrate the existing server-side session management to the browser, because a REST API is stateless"), you can consider Spring Boot as one of the options to build things quickly instead of Spring MVC with fusion of java8 features to yield the JSON response via API's.
3).And than last but not the least, build UI layer with AngularJS in front End encapsulating the data returned by the spring boot API's. Please note that as angular is super power full, you can do most of your business logic at client side,your DB layer just needs to give you the whole bunch of business data to render the screen,other things you can easily handle in angular.
Thus, this way by making the DB layer thin and imbibing angular at front end, you can improve performance of your existing application drastically.
You can also check this AngularJS with Spring-mvc useful thread in same context.

Dispaly Backend data using AngularJS in Java web Application

How to display Backend data using AngularJS in Java web Application.
Do I need to use RESTfull Web Services.
If I don't want to use RESTfull web services, then how should I proceed.
(In my java web application m using Spring and Hibernate.)
AngularJS is a framework used to develop single page web applications which doesn't need refreshing and will act like a mobile application.
For this purpose, all the data required by the front end needs to come from some sort of a backend API. REST is widely used for this purpose in many leading high scale websites like twitter/facebook etc.
You should develop your Java Web Application as an API without no/less HTML pages and use that in your AngularJS front end.
RESTfull web services provide and easy way to integrate your AngularJS frond end with database. It is the most popular one. But it is not the only one.
You can also achieve this via different techniques.
All you need is to make call to a server technology that returns a JSON object.
That particular server technology (even a simple JSP/Servlet) can interact with database and return the expected data in JSON format.
This link provides a simple example to help you begin with.

Separate frontend and backend in Java - Spring MVC Framework

I'm new at Spring MVC framework i want to learn how to fully separate frontend(html,js etc.) and backend(java).
I'm going to use RESTfull services, play with JSONs.
I think i'm going to build Single Page Application.
Most of tutorials shown in jsp pages which i dont like.
I saw my friends company project(Using Spring MVC) they used Embedded Jetty server and in server configuration they assigned two different paths for frontend and backend paths.
I saw frontend codes there was only html javascripts etc. on the backend side the approach was the same.(Fully Separated !!!)
My question is:'How they pass requests from frontend to backend and get results from backend and update frontend'.
Also they were using Maven backend and frontend defined as modules in the root.
Could you share tutorials so i can understand playing with codes ?
'How they pass requests from frontend to backend and get results from
backend and update frontend'
They probably use HTTP[S] as the transport and JSON as the data representation format. Browsers support AJAX which allows you to make HTTP connections without reloading the page.
Could you share tutorials so i can understand playing with codes ?
No, that's not what this site is for.
Comments:
JSP is still very useful for generating HTML on the server. This is pretty close to necessary if you want Google to crawl your site.
Check out Spring Data REST for a framework for quick REST APIs.
Also check out ExtJS or Dojo for good Single Page App frameworks.

Create json rest api without writing or integrating any code

I've 2 questions about Java Rest APIs
1'st:
I would like to create a Rest API with Java Servlets for using in the mobile applications(IOS and Android)
and before doing that I would like to clarify the rest api content. However as much as I search through google all I found was automatic API creators from your Java code. But what I want is different first I want to document our Json Rest API so mobile and server developers can start to work independently.
Do you know any tool for that?
2'nd:
What I want to achive in our java server application is simple. Get simple json requests from mobile clients and do some database query and respond back with simple json objects.
For achiving this do I need to use any additional Rest API framework such as spring mvc (or something else) or just using Java Servlets and parse the request in doPost method and respond it there
Which one do you suggest?
Thanks
Restlet Studio (http://restlet.com/technical-resources/restlet-studio) or APISpark (http://restlet.com/products/apispark/) can bring you what you expect.
Restlet Studio allows you to define / design you API with a Web IDE: resources and their methods, representations (exchanged data structures). You can then have access to corresponding Swagger content and generate online client SDKs and even server skeletons for your API (this is internally based on Swagger Codegen)...
To implement your RESTful applications, Restlet can help you. It's a Java REST framework to access and / or implement RESTful applications. Restlet can be used within a servlet container with its servlet extension (see this link https://github.com/restlet/restlet-tutorial/blob/master/modules/org.restlet.tutorial.markdown/02_Server_Side/04_Server_Deployment/02_Servlet_Deployment.md).
Hope it helps you.
Thierry
I aggree with Stephan comment.
With Spring Boot and Spring Data Rest, the only code you will need to write is the mapping between your DB and your DAO Entities.
To document your API before writing it, you can use in fact any regular tools.
REST APIs don't have anything specific compared to others APIs to be documented.
Much of the documentation of APIs I've written were using Ms-Word...
Swagger provide a Json syntax to document a REST API, but it is mainly useful when used with Swagger-Ui, which allow to request the deployed server dynamically. You can use Swagger for your documentation, but as there will be no already existing server, I'm not sure it is worth the cost of learning its syntax. The main benefits is to give you constraints (like predefined fields) to follow.
By the way, I think that writing a REST Api Mapping or just document it takes the same amount of time, so I'm not sure it is really worth making all the documentation in a stand-alone way.

Is JAX-RS suitable as a MVC framework?

JAX-RS has some MVC support, but I wonder if JAX-RS is really a good choice to build web application for human use.
If a user enters wrong or incomplete information in a form, it should be displayed again like with Grails or Wicket. Is there a comfortable way to do this with JAX-RS?
As far as I know the URI mapping doesn't work correctly, if not all required parameters are given or there are type conversion problems (with Date for example). Is that correct?
Is there support for internationalized templates?
Here is an example for a simple JAX-RS based GUI application. But it is really simple and thing like i18n and validation are not discussed.
Yes you can, but you have to clear your head of the old page-post model and start to think of your application as a disconnected UI that communicates with a RESTful SOA. When form data is entered, it post to a service endpoint if the data is not correct then you respond back with an error and the UI handles dealing with that error. You do not post forms to the server in the traditional page-post model but rather you make RPC like calls to your back end system. Your view becomes completely detached from the rest of MVC stack. This makes replacing the view with a custom mobile or IVR system extremely simple.
If a user enters wrong or incomplete information in a form, it should be displayed again like with Grails or Wicket. Is there a comfortable way to do this with JAX-RS?
With a rich internet application you do not have to repopulate data because you never left the page, an XHR call is made to the server and either a success 200 is sent back or an error. The UI then decides what to do based on that response, but the page is still intact because the call was out of band from the main UI thread.
JAX-RS is the Java EE RESTful framework. JavaServer Faces (JSF) is the Java EE MVC framework. It supports all what you've mentioned in your question: postback to same form on error, i8n/l10n and much more. To learn more about JSF, go through Java EE 6 tutorial part II chapters 4-9.
You can do a bit MVC with JAX-RS, but it isn't a full fledged MVC framework. The same story goes on that you can do a bit RESTful with JSF, but it isn't a full fledged RESTful framework.
If you want best of both worlds, I think you really need to head to Ruby on Rails or Groovy on Rails.
Or take the integration approach to get the best of both worlds: JAX-RS + MVC.
The JBoss RESTEasy implementation of JAX-RS integrates with Spring MVC. See http://www.jboss.org/resteasy
Here's a little tutorial on RESTEasy + Spring MVC: http://java.dzone.com/articles/resteasy-spring
There are lots of questions in this one, I'll give my view on two of those.
"I wonder if JAX-RS is really a good choice to build web application for human use."
Web services are usually for machines to interact with, although I would argue it is usually humans that have to programme the interactions - this needs to be compared with SOAP where, at the moment, there is much more scope for machine generated code from WSDLs.
"If a user enters wrong or incomplete information in a form"
then in a RESTful HTTP web service which accepts a html form representation you should return HTTP error 400 because the client has provided a representation that does not conform to the representation your service expects - it is up to the client to deal with the error.
Take a look at ReXSL - it's an MVC framework, on top of JAX-RS. Thus, the answer is - yes, JAX-RS is perfectly suitable for MVC design.
Short answer: YES.
It serves as the base to implement MVC (MVC 1.0 - JSR 371) for JAVA EE 8. The Controller will be a JAX-RS bean with #Controller annotation (on class or methods).
For mor information see: MVC 1.0 (JSR 371)
If you took that path at your time you've done a really good decision, it should make it easier for you to upgrade and use the new Java EE 8 MVC architecture.

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