Overview
Plants By
WebSphere® is among a number of samples that are provided with the
IBM® WebSphere® Application Server Feature Pack for Web 2.0. The application
is based on the orginal Plants By WebSphere application that is provided
with the IBM WebSphere Application Server product. The Ajax version
is meant to exemplify a typical JavaTM EE application and how it can be
enhanced with an Ajax styled architecture without rewriting the entire
application. The sample application represents a fictitious online
Plant store where one can order and purchase flowers,
trees, vegetables, and accessories. You can view an online catalog,
select items, and add them to a cart. When the cart contains items,
you can proceed to log in, supply credit card information, and checkout.
The application serves as an example of a web application that
someone might attempt to develop. This application contains model,
presentation, and controller layers that can be developed. Additionally,
Ajax-style architecture is added through the JavaScriptTM Dojo Toolkit.
Specifically, the use of various Dojo widgets and enablement of drag-and-drop
capabilities for the shopping cart are added. Figure 1.0 illustrates
some of the features of the PlantsByWebSphere application.
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To support drag and
drop, a number of Dojo widget controls were created. The widgets include
support for displaying the inventory in a grid, displaying detail
information on the items and dragging items to a shopping cart. When
you click check out, the content of the shopping cart widget
is sent to the server for processing. The grid widget that displays
the content of the catalog derives the information by issuing a request
to the server using the dojo.xhr(Get,Put). The response from the server
is sent back in XML format and contains detail information and a Universal
Resource Locator (URL) reference to where the image is located. Figure
2.0 shows the general components discussed previously.
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> Server Side
The PlantsByWebSphere application
also includes an additional adapter layer using the Remote Procedure
Call Adapter (RPCAdapter) which is provided with the Web 2.0 Feature
Pack. The RPCAdapter library can be used to map traditional J2EE constructs
such as Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs), Web Services, and POJOs to lightweight
constructs such JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) or XML data. The
data can easily be consumed and rendered by JavaScript based clients
using Dojo. Refer to the RPCAdapter documentation included with the
Web 2.0 Feature Pack for additional details. In the case of Plants
By WebSphere, the RPCAdapter is used to map client side GET requests
to "legacy" EJB or Servlet session data. The data is returned as XML
and used as input to construct the Dojo widgets within the Browser.
Additional information on the Plants By WebSphere application
and the IBM WebSphere Application Server Feature Pack for Web 2.0
can be found on IBM's developerWorks. Listed below are two examples: