Harvard's Dataverse Network: A JSF/EJB 3.0 Technology Data Sharing Solution on Java EE 5
TS-4656

The Harvard-MIT Data Center provides an open source platform for management, dissemination, exchange, and citation of virtual collections of quantitative and qualitative research data. HMDC is the principal distributor of quantitative social science data from major international data consortia for Harvard and MIT and a leader in research in digital libraries and statistical methodology. HMDC is affiliated with The Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. When HMDC decided to update its technology in 2006, some of the considerations in this decision were the need for I18n, a rich client interface enabling students, researchers, and librarians to organize their work, and support for complex relationships between the entities that make up such a system.

The latter requirement may have steered the HMDC away from Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) technology in the past, but it felt that the POJO model in the EJB 3.0 architecture was well suited to its needs and chose to develop on Java EE 5. The main components of its development environment are the GlassFish application server, PostgreSQL database, and the Apache Lucene search engine. HMDC used the Sun Java Studio Creator application development tool to get started with JavaServer Faces application development and NetBeans release 5.5 as its main IDE for development in EJB 3.0 software and integration of the JavaServer Faces components with the EJB architecture. It also adapted its JavaServer Faces application pages to use Shale Tiles and adapted Shale Tiles to work with the JavaServer Faces 1.2 platform.

This case study of HMDC's experience in getting started in the Java EE 5 environment is geared to developers who are starting or considering moving to Java EE 5. It includes a demo of the HMDC application and illustrates the code that is driving it. Code samples include end-to-end JavaServer Faces/EJB technology interactions, modeling entity relationships with persistence annotations, Java technology-based code for persistence of entities involving many-to-many and other types of relationships, session facades for entities, and extended persistence contexts with stateful session beans. The session shows how HMDC uses JavaServer Faces technology to build a rich client interface, including the use of cascading style sheets in its JavaServer Faces application pages. It also presents sample code integrating its JavaServer Faces 1.2 application pages with Shale Tiles and code demonstrating its use of the Apache Lucene search engine.

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