Tuorial Santosh Bejjamshety

TUORIAL------SANTOSH BEJJAMSHETY CIS764, Fall 2006 Building a Web Application with MyFaces

Purpose: The purpose of this tutorial is to build a small web application (an Employee Information System) with MyFaces deployable on Apache Tomcat Server.

Topics: The tutorial covers the following topics:  Overview  Prerequisites  Building an application  Summary

Overview: The application that is being developed here reflects the Model View Controller architecture implemented by MyFaces which is the first open source implementation of JavaServer Faces.

Prerequisites: Before we start building application we need to set up the development environment.

Installing JDK:

Download JDK 1.4 or above from sun site. Follow the instruction given in the installation manual and install JDK. Installing Tomcat: Download Tomcat from the apache site and install it. One can download Tomcat from http://tomcat.apache.org/download-55.cgi and installed for this tutorial. Installing Tomcat on Windows can be done easily using the Windows installer. Its interface and functionality is similar to other wizard based installers, with only a few items of interest.

Installation as a service: Tomcat will be installed as a Windows NT/2k/XP service no matter what setting is selected. Using the checkbox on the component page sets the service as "auto" startup, so that Tomcat is automatically startup when Windows starts. For optimal security, the service should be affected a separate user, with reduced permissions (see the Windows Services administration tool and its documentation).

Java location: The installer will use the registry or the JAVA_HOME environment variable to determine the base path of the JDK or a JRE. If only a JRE (or an incorrect path) is specified, Tomcat will run but will be unable to compile JSP pages at runtime. Either all webapps will need to be precompiled (this can be easily done using the Tomcat deployer), or the lib\tools.jar file from a JDK installation must be copied to the common\lib path of the Tomcat installation.

Tray icon: When Tomcat is run as a service, there will not be any tray icon present when Tomcat is running. Note that when choosing to run Tomcat at the end of installation, the tray icon will be used even if Tomcat was installed as a service. The installer will create shortcuts allowing starting and configuring Tomcat. It is important to note that Tomcat administration web application can only be used when Tomcat is started. To test your installation go to your installation directory/bin and issue startup command to run the server. Open browser and type http://localhost:8080/ to test the server. It should display the welcome page. If not consult tomcat documentation before going further. On successful implementation of Tomcat we get the following screen

Building the application:

The application here developed is an Employee Information system that any small enterprise or a company maintains developed in MyFaces deployable on Tomcat Server with Oracle as back end. The screenshots for the application are as follows: After an administrator has logged in, he/she has the privileges of creating a user, deleting a user and changing the password. Now if administrator wants to create a new user – Creating a new user- Deleting a user- The code for the above application and the SQL file for the tables in the database can be downloaded from http://www.cis.ksu.edu/~santosh/EIS.

Summary:

In this tutorial one can learn:

 Setting up the development Environment for MyFaces on Tomcat Webserver  Observe the Model Control View architecture implemented by JSF  A small web application developed and deployed.