Develop an AJAX Portlet with Netbeans IDE, OpenPortal and Google Web Toolkit
LAB-4500

These days, web applications have to behave like regular desktop apps. Users expect web apps to behave dynamically and don't expect to wait for full page refresh anymore. Technology enabling this dynamic behavior is named AJAX and many software frameworks enable developers to easily integrate AJAX technology into their applications.

This LAB will learn you how develop a special kind of web application, a Portlet, with NetBeans and Google Web Kit, a popular AJAX development framework.

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is an open source Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications easy for developers who don't speak browser quirks as a second language. You write your front end in the Java programming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

This LAB will explain you how to write an AJAX enabled portlet, i.e. a portlet that refreshes itself automatically to reflect data updates on a backend server. GWT will be responsible to generate the HTML and Javascript part of the portlet and to handle the asynchronous communication with the backend server.

Our LAB portlet will show financial information : a set of stock quotes, their current price and the variation since the last quotation, in percent. These information will be provided by a backend service, implemented as a Stateless EJB and exposed as a Web Service. We will develop this backend service as part of this lab (but it will return random values and not real financial information :-) )

The portlet will then be deployed on the OpenSource Portlet Container.

This lab is entirely build on top of open source products and libraries.

At JavaOne, this lab will be presented in Hall E (Room# 132) on Tuesday, 08:20pm

Please bring your laptops to this lab as there will be no machines provided in this room.

System requirements:
• Supported OS:Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, Linux
• Memory requirement: 512M minimum, 1GB recommended
• Disk space requirement: 500 MB

Software requirements: Also please make sure to install the following software prior to coming to this lab:
• JDK 1.5.0 or newer
• NetBeans 6.0.1 full distro (including Glassfish)
• A web browser (Firefox, Safari, IE, Opera)

Optionally, you can also install these
• Google Web Kit
• Open Portlet Container
(although the first exercise of the lab will cover this installation)

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