Bob Janson: Best Project for Learning WebSphere

[Kent Bull]

Hi Bob,

I haven't read your book yet but as I read it I would like to be building an application that will drive home the concepts you teach in each of the chapters. In your opinion, what is the best or what are some of the best projects I could do that would help me to learn the technologies in your book well? Would a simple POS or a TPS be a good project? Would a support ticket system be the best? I am pretty new to programming and want to build a project that uses JSP's and Servlets.

I am looking to use Hibernate for my ORM and JSP for the front end, possibly with some jQuery. I also want to use a Spring container in my application because I want to learn Spring and Dependency Injection. I actually want to build some back-end API's that I call with JSONP's. I'm not quite sure how all of the details work yet but I want to be more sure of them after a project.

I look at your table of contents for the book and am very excited to get started. I want to get a good result as I go through the book, better than if I were to go at it without the book. Which project do you recommend would be the best to gain the value from your book?

Kent

[Robert Janson]

Hi Kent,
Well, I tend to stick with a basic TPS for all my examples but I get criticism that what I show is boring and not really showing off java capabilities (sorry no animation or javafx). The way the book is written, the chapters are continually enhancing a single application that calculates an employee's salary. Then when we convert to a server based app, I show how following MVC makes that conversion immensely easier. Then we enhance both the client and server based apps to access DBs. There are also projects at the end of each chapter that follow the same pattern - continually enhancing an app then converting to the server. Hope that helps. Sorry no JSON, Spring, Hibernate, or jQuery either.

[Kent Bull]

Mr. Janson,

I definitely appreciate a good look at MVC. I know it might not be Spring or Hibernate, but it will be teaching me examples in design patterns. The fact that it works without Spring, Hibernate, or the others I mentioned show that it could be a good example for me to try to extend with the other technologies. I look forward to reading your book!

Another question, if I decided to swap out WebSphere for Tomcat or another how would that affect my experience with your book? I read articles like WebSphere vs. Tomcat and I think that it would be possible to swap the two, but it may not work well. Is the main issue that code I would write for a WebSphere app would not run on a Tomcat server?

With this in mind do I need to have WebSphere on my computer to be able to use your book?

Edit: after doing a few hours of reading about WebSphere, Tomcat, and other application servers I see the main difference as the ability to have EJB's and a Java EE API available. I am looking at using WAS with the Liberty Profile as I do the examples in your book. Is that a configuration you recommend?

[Robert Janson]

Hi Kent,
RAD allows you to define connections to and test apps on several non-WebSphere servers and TomCat has been one of them for as long as I've been using RAD. (It looks like you have to install TomCat then specify the directory when creating the test server.) I tried to make the server based applications fairly simple. I would hope that the apps from the two chapters on Servlets and JSPs work on any JEE server (but I do use the RAD page designer tool to generate the JSPs). The more advanced chapters also use RAD to generate SDOs so I might be a little worried about that but if I were a betting man I would say they would work. But since I'm not a betting man I have to say I don't know since I haven't tried to run them on TomCat.
RAD comes with several versions of WAS (WebSphere Application Server). You just create a test WAS server and run apps from within RAD (which, of course, the book gives step by step instructions on how to do).
I know that Liberty wasn't included in RAD 8 but you could probably set it up like TomCat, just under the "other" category.
If you are just trying to learn java I would use WAS since it comes with RAD.
Did I answer your questions?

[Kent Bull]

It sounds like you are saying that your code will run on Tomcat or WebSphere since it is RAD. My question was whether I had to have WebSphere or not and whether I could use Tomcat or not as a replacement. It sounds like I can. I plan do to things in the way your book suggests and then to do them using Tomcat. It is looking like the Tomcat 8 spec will support Java EE so it's a matter of time before I can run it on Tomcat incase it doesn't now.
Thank you for your answers!