| Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) development tools
The EJB development environment features full EJB 2.0 support, an EJB test client, a unit test environment for J2EE, and deployment support for Web archive (WAR) files and enterprise archive (EAR) files. Entity beans can be mapped to databases, and EJB components can be generated to tie into transaction processing systems. XML provides an extended format for deployment descriptors within EJB.
The following EJB development tools are included:
Tools for import/export, creation and code generation, and editing, as well as support for standard deployment descriptors and extensions and bindings specific to WebSphere Application Server.
EJB-to-RDB mapping tools that provide the model, run-time environment, and interface for editing the mapping between EJB beans and relational database tables with top-down and bottom-up capability. The mappers support associations, inheritance, and converters and composers as helpers on column maps.
A query engine that supports deployed code by generating SQL strings into persistent classes.
Tools that provide the ability to create, edit, and validate EAR files.
Editors for deployment descriptors.
Graphical RDB schema viewing and editing tools.
The deployment tools for enterprise beans provides a command-line environment so that you can run overnight build processes and automatically generate your deployment code in batch mode.
J2EE perspective
All of the EJB development environment tools are accessible from the J2EE perspective. This is where your EJB projects and individual enterprise beans reside, and it is where you accomplish all of your enterprise bean development and testing activities.
Support for enterprise beans and access beans
The EJB development environment provides tools to help you create enterprise beans (either with or without inheritance), including session beans, container-managed persistence (CMP) entity beans, bean-managed persistence (BMP) entity beans, and message-driven beans. Tools are also provided to create access beans and other EJB elements, such as relationships.
Data persistence
The EJB development environment provides a mapping editor to help you map entity enterprise beans to data stores such as relational databases. There is support for top-down, bottom-up, and meet-in-the-middle development. You can also create schemas and maps from existing enterprise beans.
Deployment code
WebSphere Studio includes tools to set deployment descriptor and control descriptor properties for your enterprise beans and to generate the deployed classes that allow your beans to operate on a server. The tool that generates the deployment code is integrated with the WebSphere Studio generation options, so you can simply select individual enterprise beans as input and then select a menu item to automatically generate the deployment code. The tools support session beans, BMP and CMP entity beans, and message-driven beans. They also allow you to create relational database tables for CMP entity beans. Once code has been generated for deployment, you can export your enterprise beans to a JAR file for installation on an EJB server, such as WebSphere Application Server.
Verifying enterprise bean and access bean code
The EJB development environment automatically and seamlessly verifies that your enterprise bean code is consistent and that it conforms to the rules defined by the Enterprise JavaBean specification. Code verification occurs whenever an enterprise bean or its properties are changed. If any problems are detected, an error or warning icon appears beside the problematic lines of code and a message appears in the Tasks view at the bottom of the J2EE perspective.
The EJB development environment also automatically verifies that access beans are constructed correctly and that they are consistent with their associated enterprise beans. Code verification occurs whenever you create or edit access beans.
For more information about the EJB development environment, refer to the online help.
XML and XSL tools
The comprehensive XML toolset includes components for building DTDs, XML schemas, XML and XSL files. It also supports integration of relational data and XML.
XML editor
The XML editor is a tool for creating, viewing, and validating XML files. You can also use it to edit XML files, associate them with DTDs or schemas, and validate them.
The XML editor simplifies development tasks in the following ways:
Provides a wizard that makes it quick and easy to create XML files from scratch, or from existing DTD or XML schema files.
Provides both a Design view and a Source view. The Design view represents the XML file simultaneously as a table and a tree, which helps make navigation and editing easier. You can use the Source view to view and work with a file's source code directly.
Enables you to easily add a DTD declaration or XML schema information to an XML editor.
DTD editor
The DTD editor is a tool for creating, viewing, and validating DTDs. Using the DTD editor, you can create and validate DTD elements, attributes, entities, and notations.
The DTD editor simplifies development tasks in the following ways:
Provides wizards that enable you to quickly and easily generate XML schema files, Java beans, and HTML forms from DTD files.
Includes a built-in mechanism to handle referential integrity issues. When you delete or rename certain nodes, clean up will automatically occur.
XML schema editor
The XML schema editor facilitates creating, viewing, and validating XML schemas. You can use the XML schema editor to perform tasks such as creating XML schema components, importing and viewing XML schemas.
The XML schema editor simplifies development tasks in the following ways:
Provides wizards that enable you to quickly and easily generate DTDs, XML files, relational table definitions, Java beans, HTML documentation, and DDLs from an XML schema.
Provides pop-up menus for XML schema components, so you know what each XML component can have added to it |