Tutorials and Downloads

We offer a wide array of free tutorials and other downloads to help you get started with the latest Web technologies. We only ask that you become a registered user of the site. to register go to our registration page.

Here are some of the current tutorials that we have available:

Struts

Struts Quick Start Tutorial

Sample Chapter from Struts Live book written by our very own Rick Hightower, Chief Mentor of ArcMind, Inc.

This chapter is a tutorial that covers getting started with Struts—just the basics, nothing more, nothing less. This tutorial assumes knowledge of Java, JDBC, Servlets, J2EE (with regards to Web applications) and JSP. Although you can follow along if you are not an expert in all of the above, some knowledge of each is assumed.

Instead of breaking the chapters into a myriad of single topics, which are in depth ad nauseum, we treat Struts in a holistic manner, minus the beads and crystals. The focus of this chapter is to skim briefly over many topics to give you a feel for the full breadth of Struts. Later chapters will delve deeply into many topics in detail.

In this chapter, you will cover:

Master the Struts Tiles Framework Tutorial

The Tiles framework makes creating reusable pages and visual components easier. Developers can build Web applications by assembling reusable tiles. You can use tiles as templates or as visual components.

In some respects, the tile layout is like a display function. First you pass tile layout parameters to use. The parameters can be simple strings, beans, or tiles. The parameters become attributes to the tile and get stored in the tile's tile scope. For its part, the tile scope resembles page scope, and is less general than request scope. The tile scope lets the tile's user pass arguments (called attributes) to the tile.

Definitions let you define default parameters for tiles. Definitions can be defined in JSP or XML. Definitions can extend other definitions similarly to how a class can extend another class. Moreover, definitions can override parts of the definition it is extending.

The Tiles framework includes its own RequestProcessor to handle tile layouts as ActionForwards. Thus you can forward to a tile definition instead of a JSP if you install the Tiles plug-in.

If you are using Struts but not Tiles, then you are not fully benefiting from Struts and likely repeat yourself unnecessarily. The Tiles framework makes creating reusable site layouts and visual components feasible.

In this tutorial you will cover the following:

XDoclet

Enhance J2EE component reuse with XDoclet (PDF)

This tutorial shows J2EE developers how to use XDoclet to speed development. XDoclet simplifies continuous integration between components using attribute-oriented programming. It allows you to radically reduce development time by generating deployment descriptors and support code, allowing you to focus on application logic code.

Use XDoclet to generate Web service support files (PDF)

XDoclet facilitates automated deployment descriptor generation. XDoclet, a code generation utility, allows you to tack on metadata to language features like classes, methods, and fields using what looks like JavaDoc tags. Then it uses that extra metadata to generate related files like deployment descriptor and source code. This concept has been coined attribute-oriented programming (not to be confused with aspect-oriented programming, the other AOP). XDoclet generates these related files by parsing your source files similar to the way the JavaDoc engine parses your source to create JavaDoc documentation.

EJB

Introduction to container-managed persistence and relationships, Part 1 (PDF)

Container-managed persistence and relationships allow you to build components to the EJB 2.0 specification that can save the state of your EJBs to any J2EE supporting application server and database without having to create your own low-level JDBC-based persistence system. It also provides a unified way to support persistent fields and variables within entity beans. This two-part introductory tutorial explains all about CMP/CMR.

Introduction to container-managed persistence and relationships, Part 2 (PDF)

Container-managed persistence and relationships allow you to build components to the EJB 2.0 specification that can save the state of your EJBs to any J2EE supporting application server and database without having to create your own low-level JDBC-based persistence system. The second part to this tutorial series describes the three varieties of component managed relationships: one-to-one, many-to-many, one-to-many.

Introduction to container-managed persistence and relationships, Part 3 (PDF)

EJB QL provides the ability to query the container-managed persistent store for EJB objects without the need to learn or make database specific calls. EJB QL provides a subset of SQL and adds support for traversing relationships between entities and working with collection-based CMP fields.

Introduction to container-managed persistence and relationships, Part 4 (PDF)

This tutorial completes Rick Hightower's series on container-managed persistence and relationships in EJB 2.x with a focus on EJB Query Language. This piece details advanced finder methods and more complex EJB-QL queries.

Web Services

Web Service-enable EJB SessionBeans with the IBM Emerging Technologies Toolkit (ETTK) and Apache Axis (PDF)

This tutorial shows J2EE developers how to use the IBM ETTK (Emerging Technologies Toolkit) to make any EJB a Web Service that will run on any application server.  This  tutorial also works with Apache Axis.

Do you currently use EJB technology? Have you ever wondered how to expose an EJB component as a Web service no matter what your application server is? This tutorial shows how to use the ETTK to convert a local and remote EJB component into a Web service. I will use a subcomponent of the ETTK called Axis, a SOAP client implementation originally hosted by the Apache Software Foundation.